Amendolara

Twelve nautical miles off the coast, under the sea, there is a mountain. The Amendolara shoal lies twenty metres down and is so extensive that it is probably what remains of an islet eroded by the water; on certain charts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it is marked as Monte Sardo, and a legend — with some recent scholarship — identifies that sunken mountain with Ogygia, the island where Calypso kept Odysseus. On land the name is more prosaic: from the Greek Amygdalaria, the almond groves, for the almonds grown here.

In the Rione Vecchio there was an Oenotrian settlement; in the seventh century BC the people went down to the plain, where tradition has Epeius, the man who built the Trojan horse, found the Greek city of Lagaria: the remains are at San Nicola and the finds in the town's archaeological museum. The Romans put a posting station here, the Statio ad Vicesimum, twenty miles from Thurii. Then came the Byzantines: outside the built-up area, in a district full of hermits' caves, small domed churches of the ninth and tenth centuries survive, and one of them, San Giovanni, has the quatrefoil plan typical of the Byzantine churches of Armenia — the only example in Italy, now ruined, with a single apse still standing. The castle, restored in 1239 by Frederick II, keeps a Crucifixion of the late thirteenth century; the Torre Spaccata was raised on the coast in 1517 to watch for pirates. And in the fifteenth century the humanist Pomponio Leto was born here.