Battipaglia is a town and comune

Comune

In Italy, the comune is the basic administrative division, and may be properly approximated in casual speech by the English word township or municipality.-Importance and function:...

in the province of Salerno

Province of Salerno

The Province of Salerno is a province in the Campania region of Italy.-Geography:The largest towns in the province are: Salerno, the capital, which has a population of 139,579; Cava de' Tirreni with a population of 53,488; Battipaglia with a population of 51,115; and Nocera Inferiore which has a...

 in the Campania

Campania

Campania is a region in southern Italy. The region has a population of around 5.8 million people, making it the second-most-populous region of Italy; its total area of 13,590 km² makes it the most densely populated region in the country...

 region of south-western Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

, with some 51,000 inhabitants.

History

The birth of the comune of Battipaglia was officialised by a Royal Decree on 28 March 1929. The bourbonic

House of Bourbon

The House of Bourbon is a European royal house, a branch of the Capetian dynasty . Bourbon kings first ruled Navarre and France in the 16th century. By the 18th century, members of the Bourbon dynasty also held thrones in Spain, Naples, Sicily, and Parma...

 authorities had already chosen Battipaglia as the site of an agricultural colony, where families which had survived the 1857 earthquake in Basilicata

Basilicata

Basilicata , also known as Lucania, is a region in the south of Italy, bordering on Campania to the west, Apulia to the north and east, and Calabria to the south, having one short southwestern coastline on the Tyrrhenian Sea between Campania in the northwest and Calabria in the southwest, and a...

could be rehoused.

Further reading

• L. Rocco Carbone, Battipaglia, 70 anni nella sua storia, Massa Editore 1999.