Eliceto Resort

At a glance

Type

Noble house and hunting lodge, now a hotel

Where

Contrada Eliceto, Buccino, Province of Salerno, Campania, Italy

Coordinates

40.6331715° N, 15.3239709° E

First nucleus

1494, by the Caracciolo del Leone

Enlarged

Between 1500 and 1700, as a hunting lodge

Restored

From the 1980s, after war damage and the 1980 earthquake

Size

About 3,660 square metres over four levels

Overview

Eliceto stands on a hill in the comune of Buccino, in the Province of Salerno, in Campania, on the land between Buccino and Sicignano. Its history reaches far back: the place appears in official documents from the eleventh century, in the late Lombard and Norman period, from which the names of the lords who held the hill are known.

History

Eliceto revived under the Angevin kings with new masters of the land between Buccino and Sicignano, the Caracciolo del Leone, who in 1494 built the first nucleus of what would become the «Casina». The oldest part of the fabric was a vaulted store and a vaulted room, both still recognisable.

The building was certainly enlarged between 1500 and 1700 and brought to its present size, with the character of a hunting lodge; a seventeenth-century external horseshoe stair, of a kind common in the palaces of the period, was built then and later removed.

In the 1980s the old noble palace passed definitively from the Caracciolo-Elefante families to the members of the Casina Elefante, and a thorough conservative restoration followed, made necessary by war damage and by the earthquake of 1980. Old materials were kept and recovered and the structure consolidated by modern means, with care not to touch the original architecture; the consolidation of those years was carried out in reinforced concrete, leaving the old load-bearing structure intact where possible.

What you see

The house is built in stone in the manner of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as can still be seen in the semi-basement store, the one area left unplastered. Seen from above it forms a C; the three main floors are about 720 square metres each, the semi-basement about 800 and the roof space about 700, some 3,660 square metres in all.

The entrance stands at the centre of the main front, under its old stone doorway and the single balcony of the house. Beyond the reception, furnished with period pieces, is the old family chapel, which keeps its altar and paintings by Francesco Solimena — the Madonna with the saints of the Caracciolo family. A corridor off the reception holds a fine late nineteenth-century work painted on De Ruta majolica.

The two upper floors are almost identical and hold the rooms; beside the lift are two large halls with fireplaces, used as reading room, tea room and sitting room, the last with an old billiard table.

Practical information

• Address: Contrada Eliceto, 84021 Buccino (SA), Campania.
• The house is a working hotel; the chapel and the historic rooms are part of it.

Sources

• Cultural Heritage Online historical archive — original Italian entry (beniculturalionline.it), transposed and corrected 2026.