Olivadi

Olivadi has nothing to do with olive trees, whatever the name suggests: it comes from the Greek libàdion, which means damp meadow, flat grassy ground. The registers of the Angevin chancery of 1272 call it «de casali Libathi», and the plain in question is that of the Runci, today under cultivation and once marshy. It was that very water that produced the oldest structure here: the dam known as Muru Ruttu, built before 1100 at the order of Roger the Great Count to turn the plain into a fishpond.

Like almost every village in these Serre, Olivadi has had to reckon with earthquakes, and the one of 8 September 1905 left it almost entirely flattened: few houses standing and the main church with its front wall half fallen. Three years later, on 21 June 1908, people came out into the square because the money for rebuilding was not arriving; the carabinieri fired on the crowd and killed four of them. Of the old mother church, reduced to a ruin, the shell has remained, and inside it the village theatre has been made.