A workshop
is currently running at the San Lorenzo monastery
in Padula, south-east of Salerno. It is dedicated to
the art of landscaping and gardening. The organizers
picked a good place for the workshop. The monastery is
on the edge of the Cilento and Vallo di Diano national
park, one of the most bucolic settings in Italy, and
the monastery grounds, themselves—as most such
places—have a long history of cultivating nature as
well as the spirit. In the case of San Lorenzo, that
history has had its ups and downs.
The monastery was founded in 1306 on an earlier site belonging to the Abbey of Montevergine. Technically, it is called in Italian the "Certosa" (not "Monastery") of Padula because it was built for the Certosines, a French monastic order, one favored by the French Angevin rulers of Naples. The order then took on the responsibility of reclaiming the area from swampy conditions into which it had degraded since the fall of the Roman Empire, 800 years earlier. Even today—just off the main north-south A3 autostrada— the area is in the middle of nowhere. Imagine 1300. The area, presumably, was of some strategic importance during the days of Magna Grecia since it is relatively near the ancient Greek port of Velia; then it was important to the subsequent rulers of Rome, who used the nearby Tamagro river for navigation. Thus, major land reclamation was undertaken by both the Certosine and Benedictine orders at the end of the 13th and beginning of the 14th century.
The complex has been
relatively ignored in the recent history of southern
Italy, all the more interesting since it was —and still
is— so vast. Throughout the centuries, well into the
1700s when the architects of the by-then Bourbon Kingdom
of Naples added their ornamental touches, the certosa
was modified and added to, all in the sense of keeping
it a truly self-sufficient community, thriving on its
own agriculture and crafts.
When the French took over the Kingdom of
Naples, the fate of the certosa was the same as
that of all monasteries in Napoleonic Europe; it was
closed. The order was dispossessed and the treasures
within were scattered —not
just gold and silver religious trinkets, but treasures
of culture, the books in the library (the great monastic
library, the single great preserver of learning in our
Dark Ages). Those items from the certosa, those
that remain, currently reside in various institutions in
the south of Italy, including the National Library of
Naples. Though the property was restored to the order
after the Congress of Vienna, it was described in 1845
as a place of "total abandon". The further suppression
of monastic orders and expropriation of church property
in the new united nation of Italy in 1866 ended the 500
year history of the Certosa of Padula as a
working monastery.
In 1882, many of
these institutions, including Padula, were declared
national monuments, which didn't really help; when
someone needed the space, the certosa was used
as a hospital, an orphanage, a warehouse, and a POW camp
in World War I and concentration camp in WW II. In the
1982 the site was put under the auspices of the
Superintendent of Culture of Salerno, at which point
restoration was undertaken, a project that has largely
been completed.
Archeological Museum of
West Lucania
The premises of the certosa now house the Provincial Archeological
Museum of West Lucania. The areas of Sala
Consilina, Padula and essentially the whole valley of
the Tanagro river have long been known to be a rich
source of artifacts of the Italic people of ancient
Lucania. A large pre-Hellenic necropolis containing
about 2,500 tombs was discovered at Sala Consilina in
1872 during work on the National Calabrian roadway n.
19. The early excavations from the 1930s were done by
the University of Salerno and many of those artifacts
are on display in Salerno, Naples and abroad. The
Museum of Provincial Archaeology of West Lucania in
the Padula Certosa contains some of those artifacts
but mainly focuses on work done since 1955 and which
is still going on. The core of the museum consists of
artifacts from tombs and covers a time span of sixteen
centuries, from the tenth century BC to the sixth
century AD. From the museum's published literature:
The people buried at Sala Consilina were part of South Campania's native population. As often happens in similar cases, the ancient tomb objects give us the only opportunity to get information on the way these people lived...the Necropolis at Sala Consilina and no doubt the one at Padula were located along the internal trade route connecting Campania with southern Basilicata [Lucania] and Calabria. That is why there is such a link between the grave goods and the surrounding regions, so that the finds may also give us useful information about who travelled there or who controlled the trade routes. All those people had more or less an influence on the inhabitants of the Vallo di Diano, such as the Villanovan people at the beginning of the period of the necropolis or the Greeks towards the end of that period, who dominated culturally all the areas around their colony of Poseidonia/Paestum founded by the Sybarites in the 6th century BC.The current exhibits will expand to cover findings from other important archaeological sites in the area, such as at Vallo, Atena Lucana, Buccino and Palinuro. It is worth noting that there are in the area other well-established, but smaller, museums that contain material about the people of ancient Lucania (see this item on Roccagloriosa).
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