Our home in Italy is in a sacred and mysterious place, as narrated by our Advisory Board member Prof. Rosanna Alaggio:

The most evocative of the human senses for the preservation of the memory of places is perhaps precisely the sense of smell.
A scent, more than any other external trigger, is able to bring back to life the dimension of what has been lived, the spaces and atmospheres of a childhood, to revive the scenarios in which wonderful or dramatic events of our existence took place, buried but preserved in all their clarity, among the spaces of lightness within our soul.
Crossing Le Narici Lucane (the Nostrils of Lucania), that pass that opens on the eastern slopes of the dazzling wall of the Alburni mountains, that pass mentioned by Sallustio in the tragic story of the slave Spartacus, that pass traveled by Cicero towards his bitter exile, the traveler who has just left the boundless expanse of Pestana behind, begins to breathe the scents of a territory strongly characterized by its rough orography, by its impetuous waters, by its majestic caves.
Suddenly the alterity of a wild, harsh, anything but repelling landscape imposes itself on his eyes. The breath of a primeval nature envelops him and he breathes it, finally rejoining it.
These are the Nares Lucanae (ad Nares Lucanas), the access doors from the north to la Terza Regio of Augustea, Lucania. A narrow passage like the nostrils of a man or an animal, an obligatory passage to the reliefs of the Cilento hither-land and for this route from a stretch of the Via Popilia, the only artery that allowed connections between Rome and Sicily in antiquity.
Not coincidentally an anthropomorphic metaphor of access to one of the places in Italy where, more than elsewhere, one feels the conditioning and inspiration always exercised on every individual or collective destiny, on every product, every expression, every human activity, from manifestations of Nature, from the most violent, catastrophic, as from the most enchanting and sacred ones.

Ancient Lucania, represented in the map above, cradled a pristine natural environment, so idillic that it attracted Basilian monks seeking a place closer to God, as evidenced by the countless places of worship they left behind — from rock cliff grottos to complex monasteries.

Our location in the Vallo di Diano connects the Parco Nazionale del Cilento, Vallo di Diano e Alburni (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) to modern day Lucania (Basilicata).
We are easily reachable via a combination of buses, fast trains and fast moving highways —
By car: 3.5 hours to Rome and 1.5 hours to Naples airports.
By bus: 1.5 hours to Salerno and 2 hours to Naples train stations.