Gasperina

The statue of the Madonna di Termini, the legend goes, was found at sea by some fishermen, and three villages at once laid claim to it: Gasperina, Montauro and Montepaone. To settle the matter they entrusted it to an arbiter who could not be accused of partiality: they put the statue on a cart drawn by two oxen and established that it would stay wherever the oxen stopped. A little before the built-up area of Gasperina the beasts halted and knelt, and it is exactly there that the sanctuary bearing that name stands and keeps the statue. The village that won her is, with less than seven square kilometres, the smallest comune by area in the whole province of Catanzaro; and it still keeps the dialect names of its alleys, the rughe, one of which is written with a letter of the Greek alphabet.

Nothing certain is known of its foundation, but the first nucleus is thought to have arisen between the seventh and the eighth century, when the people of the coast fled the Saracen pirates and took refuge in the most hidden folds of the hills, from where the enemy could be seen without being seen. The first reliable notices are Norman: count Roger, struck by the personality of Saint Bruno of Cologne, persuaded him to found the hermitage of Santo Stefano del Bosco and endowed it with very generous donations, among them the hamlet of Gasparrina. From that moment the village followed for centuries the fortunes of the charterhouse of Serra San Bruno. In 1497 it fell, with many other hamlets, to Goffredo Borgia, son of pope Alexander the sixth and prince of Squillace. After the catastrophic earthquake of 1783 the immense monastic property was taken over by the government and in 1819 sold on to various buyers; the village, having become autonomous, was the capital of a mandamento with the magistrate's court and the other offices of the state, before the twentieth century brought it mass emigration.