Lauria owes its name to a way of being a monk. Around the year 960 saint Saba stopped here on his way up the peninsula from Sicily, and according to his hagiography he built an oratory with his own hands; around that nucleus lived hermits of the Greek rite, and from their form of monastic life, so the sources say, comes the name of the town that would be born shortly afterwards.
What to see
Few ruins remain, recognisable as those of the grange: the complex has been in ruin since the seventeenth century. But this was one of the most important centres of Greek-Orthodox culture in Basilicata, together with the monasteries of Carbone and Cersosimo. We are on a real border: the Noce valley separated Byzantine Calabria from the Lombard territories of Latin rite.
From the eleventh century the abbey grew, partly because it suited the Byzantine authority to make the abbot an imperial official; it came to house some sixty monks and for four centuries had autonomous jurisdiction. Then the Greek rite was abandoned, and from there the decline began. A little higher up there was a settlement still called Coro dei monaci, from the Greek chorio, village.
Visiting
The site is at San Filippo, in the territory of Lauria; these are ruins out in the countryside, with no ticket and no hours, and they must be reached in proper shoes. Half an hour.
Our editors' tip
Look at the ridge they call dell'Armo: the name comes from the Greek eremos, that is desert, solitary, and it is full of caves where the hermits lived. In Basilicata the Greek word for desert has stayed attached to a hillside for a thousand years, and it did not leave when the rite left.