Marcedusa

That the Greek city of Macalla stood here is a hypothesis, but the ground supports it. Tradition says it was founded by Philoctetes, the companion of Ulysses, and dedicated to the physician Macalla, the man who healed his arrow wound; the city is said to have been made of five hills in a row, with a temple to Apollo on the one facing east. The five hills really are there, one after another, and the last is the one the village stands on. Of the rest only stories remain: the ruined chapel on Santa Maria hill, which rested on stone blocks far too large for it, was pulled down in the nineteen-seventies to make room for new houses, and the Doric capital that until the fifties served as a boundary stone on the main street has been carried off.

The first document naming the village is from May 1225 and concerns salt: Frederick II confirms an abbey's right to gather the salt that surfaces in these parts. But the Marcedusa of today is born later, when a feudal lord had it repopulated with Albanian refugees, and the tax rolls say so precisely: in 1541 the hamlet counted seventeen Albanian hearths, in 1557 it had twenty-eight against seven Latin ones. Since then Arbëreshë is spoken here, and in that language the village is called Marçëdhuza.