The town history and heritage

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The town history and heritage

Looking at old history books, we must admit that there is not much written about Genzano di Lucania town history. However the myth says that Genzano is very old and it was named from a legend that tells us that a young guy called Iens (yens) fell in love and eloped with a young princes called San, they went to live in the caves in the chasm, which today are below the town of Genzano, and then, they started to build a small castle, where the old town of Genzano is now, the name is virtually the two name of the lovers put together Iens-san (yensan, or jenzan) I am saying this because I know that in strict dialect of the town even today it is pronounced Yenzan with no G at the beginning and no O at the end. I know I have said this before, but I want to explain it a bit more to make sense.

(For those people that can read Italian, I am going to paste here a couple of links that modern writers have written about the history of Genzano di Lucania: One writer has these two link, here, Arch. Pietrapertosa - Storia e dintorni - Genzano di Lucania, this writer has two links and both are very interesting,

http://ass-gentius.blogspot.it/ , let us hope they work)

Now let us talk about more recent history that a recent write has discovered in the archive of Potenza; this writer is Ettore Lorito and you can find his writings, if you follow the link of (scrittori e poeti, (as shown above)) one of the first times that Genzano is mentioned in the archives is that of two brothers Secondo and Donato who were Christian martyr in the year 258 AD, as they were beheaded in Genzano ordered from council Valeriano, which I guess was a Roman council for that part of Italy. This seems to be the oldest written record found written about Genzano history and not much else; so, let us go back to the Greek chasm story.

Because in this article we want to describe to you the chasm on the other side of Genzano that we call the Greek chasm, we have to say that this chasm starts about fifty meter from the fountain Cavallina, or perhaps I should say that at the beginning of the Greek chasm is where the fountain Cavallina is, then suddenly the chasm becomes very deep and a real chasm that is hard to go into it, and nobody goes there, unless you have to go there and know the way how to get there; anyhow this part of Genzano is called the Greek chasm, so, by this name it is understood that a very long time ago there must have been a colony of Greek people living there.

About the Greek people and whatever happened to them nobody knows today, as there is no trace of them and there are no records to check with. So, we are forced to assume that there was a war, or something like that and they were driven out. Or perhaps they mixed with the rest of the inhabitants of Genzano and nobody remembers, or perhaps, as time went by lots of other things happened that changed the shape of the chasm; so, it became impossible for them to live in the chasm, because of the erosion and other natural factors which slowly changed the shape of the chasm, and the use of the chasm, there might be other factors as well, but let us now talk about the more recent history of this place.