For nine years, – from 1686 to 1695 – , Vico stayed in the rooms of the Vatolla castle, assigned to oversee and educate the marquis’s children; simultaneously, thanks to the castle’s rich library, he was able to deepen his studies in literature and philosophy, until 1697, the year when the scholar obtained the chair of eloquence at the University of Naples.
In those very rooms the Vichian Museum was established. The building housing the museum is a trapezoidal-plan fortress with small elegant turrets rising at its corners; it dates back to the Lombard period and was naturally remodeled several times from the sixteenth century onwards. The small manor is now known as the Vargas castle, named after the last owning family, and forms the town’s focal point, overlooking the central square.
Since 1535, the castle was home to the town’s lords, who were the Griso family, the Del Pezzo, the Rocca marquises, and the de Vargas Machuca marquises. The village was a fief of the Royal Monastery of the Holy Trinity of the city of Cava, as shown by the cadastral records of the Benedictine fiefs (1791 – 1805).
Vatolla stretches along a ridge of the gentle hills of Cilento, just a few kilometers from Agropoli. The little village has almost perfectly preserved its ancient identity, both in architecture and culture. Here, the inhabitants are very careful not to lose the centuries of culture that have accompanied the life of the small community.
Tradition has preserved an ancient religious rite, the “Flight of the Angel,” while through collective effort many tools and working instruments have been patiently collected, now forming a rich collection of farming material, kept in the old cellars of the castle. The restoration of ancient houses is also carried out with great care, bringing to light the bare stone long buried beneath many layers of plaster.
In a panoramic position at the edge of the village, there is a Franciscan convent from the 1600s. It was built over the ruins of a chapel from the 1500s, of which only one wall remains with a fresco depicting a “Pietà.” Inside the convent, there is a beautiful cloister and a maiolica-tiled refectory with a large fresco depicting the “Last Supper,” a work by Giuseppe De Vivo from 1738.
The Municipality of Vatolla, always respecting a plan to recover and protect its territory, plans to restore the ancient water mill, built a short distance from the castle, in a small gorge where the water of a stream (now almost dry) once drove its paddles.
