San Sostene

In the old centre of San Sostene the great houses were linked to one another by underground passages, and they served for escaping when the Saracens came. The village, for that matter, had already moved for the same reason: the ancient settlements stood at Portonuovo and at Pacile, the headland above the coastal plain, and malaria and the raids pushed them higher up, into the area of the Spirito Santo, where until the eighties the remains of the church of the Romitorio could still be seen. The scattered quarters lived in by the various families were later gathered by the Basilian monks on the present site. The mother church, dedicated to Santa Maria del Monte, stands on the remains of a medieval castle held to have been a Norman castrum with a garrison, and later belonging to the Pignatelli: inside there are eighteenth-century frescoes and canvases, altars of polychrome marble, and in the chapel of the souls of purgatory older frescoes show through under the lime.

The strongest rite is that of Good Friday. During the evening sermon the priest calls the Madonna, and the bearers carry her into the church at a run so that she may embrace her son again; then the procession comes out, opened by the Ecce Homo, with the dead Christ in the naca and, last, Mary, who holds her scourged son in her lap and on her breast a heart with seven swords, the seven sorrows. The torches are modern now, but once they were made by greasing the varvaschie, the dry stalks of a local plant. On the first day of the year, instead, the statue of the Child Jesus goes round the houses of the village and returns to church accompanied by a torchlight procession.