Cortale

The earthquake of 1783 destroyed the oldest part of the village, Cortale Inferiore, and killed hundreds of people; most of the survivors moved into a new quarter built higher up, Donnafiori. Then the quarrel began. When it was decided that the archpriestly church — that is, the chief church of the village — would be the new one, raised in the new quarter, the old quarter of Basserughe fought back: the dispute was long, troubled and at times armed, and the argument of the old quarter was that the title should stay with its own church, which had yet to be rebuilt after the damage of the earthquake. Two neighbourhoods of the same small village came to blows to decide which of them was the village. The mother church, built in 1799, is decorated with nineteenth-century stuccoes and frescoes by the painter Andrea Cefaly.

Cortale stands at the centre of the narrowest point of Calabria, on a ridge from which the Ionian and the Tyrrhenian sea can both be seen at once. Its beginnings lie in a Basilian monastery whose boundaries are carefully described in a letter of the great count Roger of Hauteville dated the sixth of May 1098. In the church of San Giovanni is kept a limestone cross found in the fields in front of it, to which popular tradition ascribes miraculous benefits: it has been shown for a time at the Louvre and at an exhibition of sacred art in the Vatican. Among the ruins of the church of Sant'Anna, brought down in 1783, an inscription in the Achaean alphabet of the seventh century before Christ was found instead. The oldest fountain, the Five Channels, is of the sixteenth century. The village used to work silk, starting from the rearing of the worm — the mulberry groves are still in the fields around — and today it is known for its beans, five varieties of them, now a Slow Food presidium. In August it holds a jazz festival, and the middle of the month is given to a feast named for the forgotten, in honour of a local poet.