Salerno

With the court gone to Palermo, Salerno lived on as a princely title. In 1272 Charles I of Anjou made it a principality reserved for the heir to the Neapolitan throne, and from the 14th century most of the province fell to a great baronial house whose princes ruled it as if they owned it, filling their palace with artists and men of letters; the poet Bernardo Tasso, father of Torquato, served the last of them as secretary. That prince quarrelled with the Spanish viceroy over the Inquisition in the early 1550s and fled to France, his estates were confiscated, and the city that had lived off its princes began a long decline. Its medical school lingered on, by then teaching from books alone, until Joachim Murat closed it in 1811.