Ancient sources tell that near here stood Leutarnia, a city of Magna Graecia said to have been founded by the seer Calchas, an exile of the Trojan war: it is a legend, and should be taken as such. Albidona, however, has given its own name to something very concrete, which is studied in universities: the flysch of Albidona, a geological formation of alternating layers that starts at the Trebisacce fault, on the Ionian, and reaches as far as the north-western side of the Pollino, attaining in places more than two thousand metres of thickness. It outcrops more or less everywhere in the communal territory, but is best read along the ridge of the Serra del Manganile and in the gorges cut by the streams, where the rock walls show the succession of the strata like the pages of a book. A village of a thousand people that is in the geological literature.
The built-up area stands on three adjacent hills, which here are called timpòni: Timpone Castello, Timpone Fronte and Timpone Guardiano. It is this arrangement that gives it the singular shape of a half-moon, with the old centre facing south-east and the new quarter south-west. The territory runs from a short stretch of beach up to the Timpone della Foresta, which passes eleven hundred metres: among the comuni of the upper Ionian that have a piece of coast, Albidona is the one with the greatest difference in height. The Saraceno torrent, the longest in the territory, worked five mills along its course, and its name may recall the raids of the pirates or allude to its floods. Among the village's first feudal lords is the poet Ruggiero d'Amico, a member of the Sicilian school, a justiciar of Frederick II and then a conspirator against him; among the last, Ottavio Mormile, foreign minister of Joachim Murat. On the coast stands the sixteenth-century tower built against the Saracens, which the village also calls the tower of the Monks because in the seventeenth century it belonged to them. And in 1966 Albidona raised one of the first monuments in Calabria dedicated not to one war, but to the fallen of all wars.
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📅 Every year, on 8 May
On 8 May Albidona, a municipality of 1,463 inhabitants in the province of Cosenza, celebrates its patron Saint Michael the Archangel; the feast draws many emigrants every year.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Albidona, but an easy day trip away.
