Caraffa di Catanzaro

The Albanians who founded this village had arrived in the kingdom of Naples around 1467, fleeing the Ottoman advance in the Balkans, and had settled in a place called Arenoso. To gain land to cultivate they had the mountain above them cleared of its trees — and the mountain began to slide. The landslides came closer to the village year after year, until they swallowed it. So, around 1550, the baron of Tiriolo, Ferdinando Carafa, allowed those families to move to a nearby locality, on one condition: that the new settlement should take the name of his house. That is why an Arbëresh village is called Caraffa. The first numbering of hearths, on the seventeenth of May 1567, records that the newcomers from the casale of Arenoso had been there for fifteen years, which fits.

On the twenty-eighth of March 1783 an earthquake with its epicentre a few kilometres from here shook the whole region; the aftershocks went on for about three years, and the ground was left marked with collapses, landslides, faults, cracks, craters and even new springs and new lakes. Much of Caraffa came down and the dead were many. It was judged that rebuilding on the primitive site was not worth while, and the village was raised again elsewhere: on the new site the church was begun, the roof and all the woodwork were started on the eighteenth of October 1792, and the blessing came on the eighteenth of September 1798. Caraffa has since lost the Byzantine rite, but it has kept the Arbëresh language and culture, and it has an institute named after the linguist Giuseppe Gangale to preserve them. And on clear days, from the highest point of the village, the Ionian and the Tyrrhenian can be seen together.