Palermiti

The village was made by outsiders, and the name says so: around 1509 families of rich Palermo merchants came up this hill, fleeing persecutions and inquisitions. They began to raise their masonry houses on the highest part, and to the place that had taken them in they gave the name of the city they came from — Palermiti, that is, people of Palermo. The hill stands at nearly five hundred metres on the eastern slopes of the Serre, with the gulf of Squillace a little beyond; the territory climbs from the two hundred and forty-five metres of the valley floor to the eight hundred and fifteen of the heights. The patroness is the Madonna of the Light, celebrated twice a year: the small feast, 'a hesta picciula, on 2 July, and the great feast, 'a hesta randa, on the last Sunday of August.

The story of that painting is worth the feast. In 1720, at a place called Murorotto — named after the ruins of an old dam — peasants coming back from the fields saw a light among the brambles; when they had pulled away the weeds they found an old painting of a Madonna in blue and red robes, with the Child and a lit torch in her right hand. They called her the Virgin of the Light and the pilgrimage began. Detaching her from the wall, though, nobody could manage: many tried, and in the end a mason from Palermiti did it. Then the quarrel broke out over where to take her, because all the villages around wanted her, and a Solomonic solution was found: they put the painting on a cart drawn by oxen and let it choose for itself. The cart went round the district and stopped here, where the oxen knelt. The picture ended up in the church of San Giusto, which the earthquake of 1783 brought down; today it is in the mother church.