Orazio wants to go on holiday, Boccaccio sets us some novels, Basile sends us a character at the Fair. Salerno is present in novels and novels along two millennia.
Salerno was a Roman colony, and evidently already in the times of the Empire had fame as a resort town.
Orazio in the XV epistola decides to go on holiday to the sea and wants to escape from places too well known as Baia. He therefore addresses his friend Numonio Vala and asks him: “How is winter in Velia? What is the climate in Salerno, Vala? What people live down there? How’s the road? “
What interests the poet of Lucca is a pleasant climate, the possibility of eating good fish, “a generous, loving wine, that frees me from thoughts, it turns me in the veins and in the heart full of hope”.
We do not know if he finally chose Salerno or Velia (now Ascea on the coast of Cilentana), but still he would have found what he was looking for.
In the Middle Ages Salerno is instead known for the Medical School and for the fame, not always pleasant, of experts in poisons of his doctors, fame that we know also concerned Sichelgaita.
A legend tells Roberto, son of Norman king William the conqueror, wounded by a poisoned arrow and then arrived in Salerno to be healed. Terrible care, because only someone who sucked the poison from the wound, but dying instead, could save it. And so did his wife Sibilla, who healed Roberto and died.
This is narrated by Hartmann von Aue who lived on the 11th and 12th centuries, who in his poem Il Povero Enrico, written in the upper-German, tells of Prince Henry who hit by leprosy, arrives in Salerno from Germany to be cured, but what is prescribed is terrible: only the blood of a virgin can save him. A girl offers herself, but Henry unworthyly refuses and is rewarded by a miracle that makes him heal and allows him to marry the young man.
A story narrated in the nineteenth century by Longfellow, the poet who translated the Divine Comedy into English. Salerno remains linked to the Medical School, so much so that of the three novels of the Decameron set in Salerno, one is dedicated to Mazzeo della Montagna, a doctor who is perhaps inspired by Matteo Silvatico. But of Salerno from the thirteenth century it is also spoken for the fair, and so does the same Boccaccio in another novella, in which a young Florentine merchant, goes to trade for the Fair of Salerno.
Of Salerno speaks in many novels, of course, Masuccio, which sets some events in which the Salernitans make a beautiful figure and they drink of amalfitani and cavuoti (i.e. inhabitants of Cava dei Tirreni). In these novels we mention the Church of St. Augustine and the Via Drapparia, today’s Via dei Mercanti. Two centuries later, the author of Lo Cunto de li Cunti also knows the Fair of Salerno.
Basil in the novella entitled “The cockroach, the mouse and the cricket” tells a character: “There are therefore these one hundred ducats: go to the fair of Salerno and buy many young people, so in three or four years we will make many oxen. ”
In the following centuries of Salerno, the travellers of the Gran Tour are speaking, describing the agity of the landscape and the natural riches of the Gulf.
Foscolo set in Salerno his tragedy, Ricciarda, with a medieval fantasy setting: “It is a tragedy all love, and terrible for contrasts of piety and ferocity, and affections of friendship, love, fraternity. ” So he writes the Foscolo to Silvio Pellico.
Among the many nineteenth-century travelers of Northern Europe there was also the great Christina Andersen, who in his fantastic novel
The improbable discovery of the burial of Alexander the Great in the Cathedral in Salerno. Fantasious reconstruction, but true description of the tomb, a Roman sarcophagus, of those still found in the atrium of the Cathedral. Quickly last in the long literature two thousand years, which we conclude with the verses of the most famous Salento poet, Alfonso Gatto, who wrote the poem known to all citizens: Salerno rhymes in winter, O sweet winter. Salerno rima d’eterno.