Scafati Audioguides

Scafati sits on the Sarno River where it splits into branches before reaching the plain below Vesuvius, about halfway between Naples and Salerno. It was a border town in the medieval period, marking the line between the Duchy of Benevento and the Duchy of Naples, and borders have a way of shaping a place's temperament. Under the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Ferdinand II planted textile workshops and an artillery magazine here, giving the town its industrial character long before industrial was a word people used.

The mountain has always been part of life here.

In 1707 pyroclastic rocks fell across the area during one of Vesuvius's less famous eruptions, and the town has been rebuilt and repurposed several times since. British troops liberated Scafati on September 28, 1943, and the postwar decades brought the demographic and economic pressures that reshaped so much of Campania. Today it is a working town of nearly 50,000 people with the agri-industrial heritage of the Sarno plain around it.