GOLFO DI SALERNO

 To indicate the city as a fortified place, Latin uses three words with similar meanings: "castrum", "castellum", and "oppidum". The term "castrum", with the addition of the term to the name of the place, indicated the camp fortified by the legionaries: these were mostly built in wood, and it is for this reason that today we do not find any trace of them. The entry "oppidum" instead has its original meaning in every space surrounded by walls, and consequently the meaning of a fortified place but also of a city is taken up. The original nucleus of the Roman colony of Salernum was a castrum, a military camp. The Roman castrums were not designed to withstand long sieges, as we are used to seeing in films about medieval castles with catapults, towers, fiery arrows, etc., but they had to prevent enemies militarily "primitive" and militarily backward, armed with a sword, shield and ladder, penetrated inside the military camp. A seri...

 In 268 BC, Romans deported, from the Adriatic coast, 360 thousand Picentini (an ancient Italic people), founding among other things the town of Picentia (now Pontecagnano).  In Hannibal’s military campaigns in Southern Italy, during the Second Punic War (218-202 BC), the Picentini rose up and came over to the Carthaginian. For this reason, at the end of the conflict, the Romans forced them to live scattered on the territory. The city was violently destroyed during the Social War (90-89 BC) and there was the consequent dispersion of the inhabitants in smaller suburban villages.

 The civil system, distinct between the Order and the People (Ordo Populusque) provided that the administration of the peculiar public and the care of public affairs remained with the citizens and the nobles, and that the offices remained divided between the nobility and the people. The certainly functional buildings of Roman propaganda are those intended for public events, and in particular the theaters and amphitheaters. Unfortunately, no monumental remains of the time have come down to us, because the Roman remains lie at a considerable depth compared to today's city, buried by catastrophic floods such as that of the 4th / 5th century AD. Salerno at the time of the Empire already had a reputation as a holiday city. Quinto Orazio Flacco, in the 15th epistle published in 20 BC, having an eye disease, perhaps ophthalmia, decides to go on vacation to the sea and wants to escape from too well-known places such as Baia. He then turns to his friend Numonio Vala and asks him: "What...

Salernum has grown on itself in a continuous overlapping of the levels of attendance. This succession, commonly referred to as "palinsesto", it has not spared any of the buildings of the historical center, under which lies the whole  old Roman settlement. Anyway the first documented Roman presence in the area was not a city but a Castrum, a stable encampment fortified by legionaries. The position of this stable was probably in Plaium Montis. Salernum as oppidum is, for the first time, remembered with certainty in the year 197 BC when (with the lex Atinia de coloniis quinque deducendis), Rome decided to found five civium colonies on the coasts of Campania and the neighboring Lucania Tyrrhenian ones, including a brand new close the Castrum Salerni. So in the first years of life of the "Castrum quo in loco nunc oppidum est", the new Roman trade colony (made by simple citizens) and the ancient military castrum had to coexist, since the latter probably performed the task...

 

Due to its location and the confluence of some important roads of Roman origin, as well as the discovery of archaeological finds, scholars believe that it was the forum of the Roman colony, the political and commercial center of the city.

The rest of ancient Oscan-Etruscan settlement of Irnthi (Fratte) are still located and visible on the northern periphery of Salerno, on a low, flat hill.  The area is part of a much larger settlement, situated in a dominant position at the confluence of the river Irno with the Pastorano and Grancano torrents. The position of the site has always had, within the Irno valley, a strategic value in controlling the natural transport routes, from the nearby Irno river and from the proximity to the sea and the Sorrento peninsula, and an important role in favoring connections among Greeks, Etruscans, and indigenous peoples inhabiting the Gulf of Poseidonia, to the south, and the areas of Sarno, Cumae and Volturno, to the north. The foundation of Fratte is to be understood as the result of a shift of aristocratic members linked to Tarquinia and Vulci in order to move the Etruscan commercial center of gravity to Campania further north, to counter Poseidonia.  Since its creation, the clea...