It is the highest comune in the Pollino National Park, at a thousand metres. The oldest document concerning this land is a parchment of 1193 written in Greek and translated into Latin only in 1277: a donation of certain fields to a monastery, with the boundaries listed one by one. The village, though, is much later and has a precise date: it was founded in 1633 by Alessandro Pignone del Carretto on top of a settlement that already existed, probably in order to bring more land under the plough and grow more grain, and he gave it his own name. The surname del Carretto had entered the family half a century earlier, through a marriage.
Before him there had been Byzantine monks. In the Sant'Elia district stand the walls of the chapel they built around the year one thousand, and pieces of fresco can still be seen inside; they had settled there and in the other flat district of the territory, the only two where anything could be grown. In the village there is also a museum one would not expect: Guido Chidichimo, born here and become a heart surgeon, the first in Italy to operate on an open heart, left his native village the entire furnishing of his Roman consulting room, his library and his instruments.
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📅 Every year, on the last Sunday of April and on 3 May
In Alessandria del Carretto, a municipality of 530 inhabitants in the province of Cosenza, the patron Saint Alexander, pope and martyr, is celebrated on the last Sunday of April and on 3 May with the Festa della Pitë, the fir festival.
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 Alessandria del Carretto, but an easy day trip away.
