Sapri, the heart of the Gulf of Policastro
Sapri is an Italian town of 7.030 inhabitants in the province of Salerno in Campania. It is the largest country in the Gulf of Policastro.
Sapri is located in the far south of Campania, a few km from Basilicata, on the Tyrrhenian Sea, on a small coastal plain overlooking the bay of Sapri, within the Gulf of Policastro which closes the Cilento coast to the south, and it is surrounded in a semicircle by the mountains of the southern Apennines that rise behind it.
The city of Sapri has very ancient origins and is considered the heart of the Gulf of Policastro, once called “Sinus Laus”. In Roman times the bay and its hinterland were held in high esteem; visited by Cicero who called it “parva gemma maris inferi” (small gem of the South Sea), admired and praised by many travelers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century who appreciated the beauty of the places and the goodness of the local population.
From 1811 to 1860 it was part of the district of Vibonati, belonging to the Sala District of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
From 1860 to 1924, during the Kingdom of Italy, it was part of the Vibonati mandate, in 1924 the mandate was transferred to Sapri until 1927, the year of its abolition in the district of Sala Consilina.
Sapri is best known for the tragic Expedition of Carlo Pisacane of 28 June 1857, remembered in verse by the famous poem the “Spigolatrice di Sapri” by Luigi Mercantini. The Pisacane Expedition failed, turning away the possibility of the establishment of a Murat Kingdom in southern Italy and paved the way for the Expedition of the Thousand. The tragic enterprise is commemorated by an obelisk erected in the first centenary located in Largo dei Trecento, a statue of Pisacane dating back to the first half of the last century in the town hall and a bronze representation representing the “Spigolatrice” (female figure collecting the spikes remained on the ground after the harvest) suggestively placed on the Scialandro rock, ideally facing the bay of Sapri where the three hundred landed. Every summer, the expedition is remembered by a re-enactment in costume of the landing.
