San Severino di Centola, in the lower Cilento, is an abandoned medieval village on the top of a hill with a two-piece summit from a saddle that divides the settlement: the ruins of the castle and the church and the abandoned houses of its inhabitants.

The village was known as “San Severino de Camerota”, and after 1861 took the current denomination of San Severino di Centola.

The farmhouse still retains the architectural features of the medieval hamlet, and the subsequent development of the village preserves traces of the Longobard, Angevin, Aragonese, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and there are more traces of the nineteenth century, while the traces of the first half of the twentieth century linked to San Severino’s last period with the abandonment of the inhabitants and its progressive “destruction”.

The hill was chosen for its strategic position of defense and control of the territory; in fact, the two rocky cliffs overlooking the “Devil’s Gorge” made the square tower and then the castle inaccessible on both sides, while the others passages were guarded by the houses that were constructed in such a way as to create a barrier similar to that of the walls. The site’s morphology that did not provide large spaces for military maneuvering attacks, and could be replaced by the building curtain, with the side facing the valley with few and small openings, so that the inhabitant themselves were the “wall”, the physical limit between the residence and the countryside, creating a defensive system camouflaged by the dwellings.

The oldest complex, built in the highest and mountainous area of the hill on the slope of the “Devil’s Gorge”, probably dates back to the X-XI century.