Zagarise

Zagarise — Saccharision in Byzantine Greek — opens out near the woods of the Sila, and the old borgo is divided into two nuclei: one leaning against the Norman tower, the other around the mother church. The territory of the comune runs from sixty-six metres above sea level up to sixteen hundred and ninety, which means that inside a single comune you pass from the olive to the silver fir. The foundation can be dated to around the year one thousand, and from the twelfth century the village was probably the fief of the Norman Ugo Falloch; the cylindrical tower, datable between the thirteenth and the fourteenth century, must have been a lookout, the advanced post of a castle. Gabriele Barrio, who was writing in the sixteen hundreds, put Zagarise into his De Antiquitate et situ Calabriae: «To the left of the Silia stands the town of Zagarise, in a rather high place, near the woods of the Sila; its name means a useful thing», and then he listed what its fields produced — prickly pears, reopontico, and Phrygian marble.

The church of the Rosario, which used to be called San Domenico, goes back to the fourteen hundreds and belonged to the Dominican fathers: it kept frescoes, and coats of whitewash have erased them. Santa Maria Assunta is dated to 1425 but may be older; the portal, of 1521, is made of a series of small arches resting on little columns whose capitals are worked with palm leaves and rosettes, and the rest of the church was rebuilt in 1783. Above the village the Sila begins: the Campanaro waterfalls; the canyon of the Timpe Rosse, red because the soil is rich in iron, where the Egyptian vulture nests; the Alpine Club refuge made out of two stone buildings of 1929 on the slopes of Monte Gariglione, from whose summit both seas can be seen. And there is the brigands' cave, at the end of a path near the built-up area: an old document of the Ministry of War confirms that there, in the years of brigandage, «a hand» of dangerous brigands was captured — that is, five. The old oil mill in the middle of the village is now the museum of oil and of peasant life, one of the eco-museums of the Sila park.