Until a few decades ago, characteristic wooden boats sailed on the Sarno river, used for fishing and for collecting reeds.
Other boats traveled along that same river 3500 years ago, when the Sarrastis settled in the Sarno valley, mentioned by Virgil in the seventh book of the Aeneid. The identification of their origin is not unanimous: it may have been a native lineage, but there are those who identify a Pelasgian tribe coming from the Pelopponnese in the High Bronze Age and settled in various areas of southern Italy, including the Sarno valley. Saron was also the name of a river from their homeland.
They made the main means of transport and communication out of that river, but also their residence. Besides building a river port, in fact, they founded a village of stilts in which a community of a few hundred people lived. The settlement developed on artificial islets, with oak wood pilings driven into the marshy soil and large reed huts on stilts. Between the islands, to connect the various structures and, therefore, their inhabitants, there were channels crossed by flat-bottomed wooden canoes. All around, there were dense woods, especially of oaks, populated by numerous species of wild animals.
The inhabitants of Longola, from the earliest stage, had relations with the East and Northern Europe, as revealed by the very precious amber necklaces, which were found together with fibulae, ceramic objects, amulets and glass paste jewelry. Without neglecting the wooden tools for agricultural work, all materials very well preserved. Like the three pirogues unearthed in successive excavation campaigns since 2000, when the first traces of the ancient village were found during the excavation for the construction of a purifier. Archaeological research has reconstructed the history of that very particular site, inhabited since the 15th century BC until the 6th, when the descendants of the Sarrasti merged with the Samnites, in strong expansion in the Sarno area.
After ten centuries of life, the village was abandoned, perhaps due to a flood. It was then that part of the inhabitants moved and found Pompeii and Nucera Alfaterna.
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