Torre Annunziata

Torre Annunziata sits on the Bay of Naples, 20 kilometers south of the city at the western foot of Vesuvius, where the Sarno river meets the sea. The Roman town of Oplontis stood here before 79 AD; Villa A, called the Villa di Poppea after Nero's second wife who probably owned it, is the largest of the seafront villas buried by the eruption and the most completely excavated, listed by UNESCO in 1997 with Pompeii and Herculaneum. The modern town is named for the 1319 watchtower and the chapel of the Annunziata built next to it.

From the 17th century the Sarno was channelled to power flour and pasta mills, and by 1900 Torre Annunziata had more than sixty pastifici. Together with Naples and Gragnano it was called the Capital of the White Art, the term for industrial dried pasta. Setaro and a handful of other small pastifici still produce by traditional bronze die and slow drying. The town was hit hard by postwar industrial decline and the 1980 Irpinia earthquake.