Laurae and frescoes
When you want to be really surprised by Cilento, it's time to discover Laurito. The walk within everyone's reach offers a unique experience where art, beauty and landscape are perfectly blended.
It stands in a naturalistic context that worth a visit alone: about 500 meters above sea level, surrounded by the green of chestnut and olive trees, with a breathtaking view: the whole valley of the Mingardo river, the entire silhouette of Mount Bulgheria, the sea of Palinuro on one side, the sea of the Gulf of Policastro on the other.
Such a perfect place could only attract those in need of refuge and protection: in the early Middle Ages, the Basilian monks, fleeing from iconoclastic persecutions, found shelter among these woods, well-known even in earlier times.
Therefore, they found a monastic agglomeration, precursor of the cenobitic model, called laurae: nomen omen, and here is the name Laurito.
This would be enough, but there is much more.
There is the most typical architecture of Cilento: stone houses, stately palaces with beautiful portals, narrow alleys with rounded and pointed arches, splendid religious buildings, in such a number as to leave you amazed.
It is in fact a municipality of not even 750 inhabitants. But again that's not all.
Laurito's greatest treasure is the Church of San Filippo d’Agira: a unique mix of styles makes this place a treasure. The Gothic cross vaults present in the upper part a series of frescoes on a blue background typical of Byzantine iconography, depicting the Twelve Apostles. The base on which they rest refers to the Departure of San Giorgio painted in Verona by Pisanello. The Flagellation, on the other hand, refers to the Stories of San Giovanni Battista that Lorenzo and Jacopo Salimbeni painted in Urbino. In the upper part, a background with ramages shows the Madonna del Latte, strikingly similar to the Madonna with Child and Rubino Galeota of the Cathedral of Naples.
The cycle continues with episodes from the life of Christ, with another rarity: one of these, the midwives washing the Child, is taken from the Apocryphal Gospels.
Impossible not to notice how this small village, in the 1400s, saw composite workers mixing styles and influences — from the Byzantine system and the Gothic to the style in vogue in the Italian artistic panorama of the fifteenth century — and give life to an unicum.
The complexity of cultural matrices from different and chronologically distant origins, a sign of great and lively culture, is the most spectacular element of this splendid place, an authentic treasure chest that every lover of beauty should see at least once.
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