Santa Caterina dello Ionio

The old town lies six kilometres from the sea, and the reason is written on the beach: there, with its feet in the water, stands a watchtower built in the thirteenth century to spot the pirate flotillas that came from the Balkans, from Greece and from Anatolia. Of more than two hundred and fifty lookout towers that once guarded this coast, the one of Sant'Antonio is among the very few left whole and still habitable. The village up above was ringed by walls with four gates, and only one remains, the Porta dell'acqua, the water gate. The church of Santa Caterina d'Alessandria speaks of the same fear: the people built it on the spot where, so the story goes, the patron saint appeared — not to the faithful, but to the Saracens — and drove them from the town. On the feudal side the history is more ordinary: first lord in 1272 Rinaldo Conclubet, and in 1487 the family was dispossessed for having taken part in the conspiracy of the Barons.

What came afterwards, on the other hand, the village has lost piece by piece. The flood of 1951 almost entirely destroyed the old church of the Madonna della Neve: today a single wall of it stands, the one with the fresco of the Virgin nursing the Child. On the twenty-ninth of July 1983 a frightful fire burned much of the built-up area and reduced the mother church nearly to ashes; it then stayed closed for some twenty years — the local source blames the slowness of the works and the scant interest of the competent authorities — and reopened only in March 2003. Meanwhile the territory goes on rising from sea level to more than a thousand metres, and the sand below the town remains one of the places where the caretta turtle comes to lay its eggs.