The landslide that stopped the clock
Few kilometers from Sanseverino (both are in fact hamlets of the Municipality of Centola - Palinuro) stands the ghost town of San Nicola.
It was a traumatic event, which took place in October 1963, to sanction the abandonment of the old village and the reconstruction of the new one: a landslide, which devastated the town and made the village slide further downstream.
The old part is like a photograph of a past that seems very distant: the town was built around the Byzantine church of San Nicola di Mira, but some studies attest that the area was a vast settlement and a sacred area ascribable to the Iron Age (12th century BC).
Subsequently, as reported by the extraordinary Aragonese Maps, the lands of San Nicola come under the control of San Mauro la Bruca and Rodio, fiefs of the Bailiwick of Saint Euphemia of the Order of the Knights of Malta, and suffered the devastating consequences of the plague of 1656 like Sanseverino. San Nicola preserves the Greek rite until the end of 1600, then in the eighteenth century it became part of the possessions of the Prince of Centola.
The ancient part was built according to the north-south axis, the church was the center: in one of the side chapels, the coat of arms of the Sanseverino, the powerful feudal family of Cilento, first of the Seven Houses of the Kingdom of Naples, is visible. Among the alleys and abandoned houses, there is the Old Fountain, called the "Spring of the Muses", from which flows water of recognized properties. All in front of the superb panorama that stretches from the mountains to the river Lambro’ valley to Capo Palinuro.
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