One of the most famous sons of Frigento was Marciano Di Leo (1751-1819), canon of the cathedral, historian, politician, poet, philosopher, author of Vesuvio, a work in verses dedicated to the Vesuvius’s eruption on August 8, 1779.
The interest of the work of Di Leo is based on the fact that it blends the scientific interest towards the natural phenomena, typical of the Enlightenment, with the classical nature of the poetic expression.
The intellectual from Frigento, even if in the limits of his personal education and the environmental context where he has acted, has undertaken a precociously holistic perspective that brings him, also in the historic and geographical production, to combine the first wail of ecology and environmental ethics with the perspectives of territory management, we would say today of right territory planning, forcing to improve his competences in the scientific field.
All-round intellectual, trained on the art works by Tasso, Virgil and Homer, Di Leo was nominated theologian canon of the cathedral of Frigento.
The work of the Canon Di Leo is not the usual chronicle of the eruption, to whom we are more often accustomed, but an authentic poem whose verses are of considerable literary depth and quality and that under certain aspects even speeds or heralds ‘The Broom’ by Giacomo Leopardi, with whom the parallelisms that can be presupposed are not few. However, in the poem of the Canon it is particularly relevant the sequence of natural phenomena, not only volcanic, happened with the eruption of the Vesuvius in August 1779.
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