They are a re-enactment of the routes taken by ancient pilgrims in the footsteps of St. Nilus, his master St. Fantinus and other Eastern monks of the Greek rite.
Largely faithful to the rule of St. Basil the Great, who, in addition to having settled in Apulia, Calabria and Lucania, had also landed numerous on the Cilento shores of Campania at various times and historical phases in this part of the Peninsula. The first, arriving as military chaplains following the generals Belisarius and Narses during the Gothic war between Byzantium and the Ostrogoths, the others, most, to escape iconoclastic persecution in the Byzantine Empire between 726 and 843.
And in the Cilento region, on the border between the lands under Byzantine rule and those conquered by the Lombards, they found favorable conditions for putting down solid roots and forging strong ties with the local populations, among whom they fervently carried out their religious mission together with the dissemination of new agricultural techniques, the diffusion of new implements, and the cultivation of new lands, fostering great economic development, strong community progress and also a significant demographic increase. A great contribution of which countless traces remain, of faith and history, everywhere in the territories of Cilento and Vallo di Diano into which the influence of the Greek monks pushed. And those traces are the red thread that ideally unites the places of the St. Nilus and Negro Ways and those who decide to walk them.
