Every design for Scafati

Scafati is known as the Piccola Venezia, the little Venice of the Sarno: the river runs straight through town, and the palazzi of the centre look out over the water as if they stood on a canal. The name itself comes from the scafa, the flat-bottomed river boat, something like a gondola, that once carried people and goods along the Sarno.

There is a sense here of a town shaped by its river and its volcano. In the early Middle Ages it lay on the border between the Duchy of Benevento and the Duchy of Naples, with a tower standing in the river itself. The town you see today grew up in the eighteenth century, once the woods of the Sarno plain had been cleared and a royal road opened through them, and Vesuvius showered it with volcanic rock during one of its eruptions. Under the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, King Ferdinand II brought textile workshops and an artillery magazine; the Parco del Real Polverificio Borbonico keeps that name alive.

Stand on the bridge where the Sarno splits into one main branch and two lesser ones, and you are looking at the reason Scafati exists.