Pentone

Of Pentone the sources say very little. The entry has a heading for history, and under that heading there is only the decree by which, in 1962, the coat of arms and the gonfalon were granted: all the rest is silence. What is written down is the geography and one building. The village lies at a little under seven hundred metres on the southern slopes of the Sila Piccola, in the province of Catanzaro, and in Calabrian it is called Pentùni. Just outside the houses, some sixty metres higher up, stands the sanctuary of the Madonna di Termine, and the square in front of it bears the name of a local archpriest, don Salvatore Mazzuca.

It is there that everything ever written down about this comune is concentrated. On the second Sunday of September the sanctuary is a place of pilgrimage, with solemn festivities repeated every year: people climb up from the village, they reach the church, and that — in the documents — is all. The title of the Madonna, for that matter, is a common word: termine is the word that means a boundary, though the sources do not explain why the Madonna of Pentone should carry it. There are comuni whose written memory comes down to a shrine and to the day people walk up to it: this is one of them, and it is worth saying so rather than filling the gap.