Places of the Salernitana Medical School

What was the seat of the Salernitana Medical School? For decades, local historians have sought a place to identify the place of the “first European university” without agreeing. Probably a real home like the ones we know was not there, but the lessons took place at the studies of the different Magistries or at the clinics, that is, places of care, often within the monasteries in which a place of care was present. The Monastery of San Benedetto, of which it was prior Alfano, for example, hosted almost certainly a place of care and therefore it will also be a place of lessons.
As for the assignment of the degrees we have more sites witnessed by literature, surely the two rooms of the Duomo, the Sala San Tommaso and the Sala San Lazzaro, the first of which, as from the name, saw the presence and teaching of the great theologian of the Scholastics. But the most prestigious of the offices was certainly the Palatine Chapel built by Arechi, which for centuries saw the assignment of the degrees.
But the site that today can give us more suggestions and knowledge of the Medical School is the Garden of Minerva, the wonderful garden of the simple ones wanted by Matteo Silvatico, the great doctor of the fourteenth century.
The characters who gave prestige to the School are many, from Alfano I, the bishop-medic, who was collaborator of Gregory VII and lived the era of the passage from the Lombard domains to the Norman one. His era was also that of Constantine the African, the monk who came from Carthage and who translated the classics of medicine from Arabic to Latin, allowing a fundamental passage of knowledge in the West. There is then Trotula del Ruggiero, the doctor, author of the first treatise of gynaecology and the aforementioned Silvatico, who knew and attended Boccaccio at the court of Naples. But there were also doctors who passed to history for other merits, to testify how in Salerno the teaching of medicine was part of the local culture; so it is for Giovanni da Procida, collaborator of Federico II and his sons Manfredi and Corradino, to finish with Matteo Luciani, a liberal patriot, the first mayor of Salerno city of the Kingdom of Italy and renewer of the city.