Sellia

How the village came to be is told by a fifteenth-century chronicle, and the tale is worth an entry on its own. Between the ninth and the tenth century the people of a coastal town, Trischene, fled from the Saracens and climbed a mountain called Sellion: there they founded a settlement named Asilia, and from that comes Sellia. The Latins settled on one side; the Greeks split, and while some stayed in the nearby valley and built a castle there, others went further, into the woods, and raised a fortress they called Taverna. At the same time, says the chronicle, Catanzaro was born. Whether Trischene ever existed, however, is still argued over.

In 1960 thirteen hundred people lived in Sellia; today there are little more than five hundred, and six in ten are over sixty-five. Faced with this, the mayor signed an ordinance that went round the newspapers: in this village it is forbidden to fall ill. It was not a joke but a protest, against a place that grows old and is left without services. Of the castle that Robert Guiscard wanted only a few walls remain, brought down by the earthquake; and in the church of San Nicola there is a Pietà that some attribute to a pupil of Michelangelo.