centro storico, di crinale, lineare, agricolo, Cervicati

Cervicati’s historic centre strings itself along a ridge-top route, its linear layout obedient to the lie of the land. This is a borgo where the everyday fabric of peasant dwellings is punctuated by noble palaces, their presence announced by decorated portals and carved coats of stone set into the keystones. Dominating the scene, in scale if nothing else, is the seventeenth-century Palazzo Barone (also Palazzo Guzzolini), which preserves documents of the past and the room where the literary critic Francesco de Sanctis stayed after the failure of the Neapolitan revolution of 1848.

The settlement’s origins are disputed: some trace it to the tenth century, others to a fourteenth-century feudal transformation by Guglielmetto di Cervicatis. It passed through the hands of various baronial families, Caselli, Sersale, Maiorana, before the Guzzolini bought it in the early 1600s and held it until feudalism’s end. A colony of Albanian refugees settled here between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, leaving customs that survive. The 1887 earthquake cracked nearly every house; eight were badly damaged, three partially demolished for perilous leaning walls.

Description via source. Coordinates and heritage data from the Atika atlas.