They had followed the course of the Irno, until they approached the place where it meets the sea.
They had left from Amina, therefore not from far away, in that unspecified year of the sixth century BC, to found a new city. And perhaps it was the very name of the river that inspired them to call her Irna. Their origin was mainly Etruscan, but among them there were also Greeks. And they found themselves sharing life in the new settlement with some natives of the pre-existing population, since that territory had already been inhabited for at least a couple of centuries. The city grew around the acropolis, on which the temple adorned with painted terracotta stood. The houses of solid tufa stone had roofs covered with tiles and tiles also in bright colors. Like the amphorae and other domestic objects, the building materials were also produced in the western area of the city, where the working of the clay collected in the nearby quarries took place.
It must have been a fairly flourishing city, when new inhabitants of Samnite lineage began to settle there, ever more numerous. Who gradually took control of the town, replacing their habits and lifestyle with that of the groups that had preceded them. The Samnites remained masters of the territory until the third century. Then the city declined, perhaps it was destroyed by the Romans, as had happened to the centres that had been their enemies during the long Samnite wars. And so oblivion gradually engulfed even the memory of the now ancient city.
It was much later that the more remote structures were found and progressively unearthed and investigated. On an area of less than half a square hectare in the north-eastern part of Salerno, where the hamlet of Fratte is located. Lands that have yielded important vestiges of the Etruscan-Samnite city and previous finds, up to the eighth century BC. Remains of cisterns, houses, ceramic workshops and the acropolis. And then of Samnite stone tombs, with the characteristic funeral beds. All within the small but interesting archaeological park in Salerno, set up to be open to the public since the second half of the last century and which can still be visited today. The objects found in the various excavation campaigns are kept in a specific section of the Provincial Archaeological Museum of Salerno.
