San Pietro a Maida

San Pietro a Maida has 4,298 inhabitants on a plateau at three hundred and fifty-five metres, below Monte Contessa, in the middle of the olive groves: about eight hundred hectares of olive trees, almost all of the carolea variety. The lower part of the territory was for a very long time a station of the Lower Palaeolithic: from the excavations begun in 1973 have come hundreds of stone artefacts that take the story of the place back to an age between seven hundred thousand and five hundred thousand years ago.

The old centre, according to Barrio, would have arisen from a fifteenth-century reclamation village called Petrum, but the more reliable evidence makes it older, perhaps a contemporary of nearby Curinga. Along the streets of the village stand the bas-reliefs in refractory terracotta by Francesco and Fortunato Violi, great slabs framed in brick that recount the history and the origin of the town. Since 1985, every two years, the town devotes a whole season of events to the olive tree.