Aprigliano

Aprigliano is one of the largest comuni of the Sila and has never had a single centre: it is made of seven historic villages at different heights, Agosto, Corte, Grupa, Guarno which is the seat of the council, Petrone, San Nicola and Vico. Most of its territory lies above a thousand metres. At Spineto di Destro the river Savuto rises, and the Crati, the greatest river of the region, also runs through here; from the top of Colli Perilli, which they call here the Cross of the Two Lakes, you can see Lake Arvo and the valley of the Ampollino.

From here comes the first poet in Calabrian dialect: Domenico Piro, known as Duonnu Pantu, born in Aprigliano in 1660 and dead here at thirty-six. A nonconformist priest, on market days he went down to Cosenza to learn from the speech of ordinary people the words and sharp sayings that would become his repertoire; for his verses, licentious and satirical, the archbishop of Cosenza had him imprisoned. His poems survived by memory and were printed only in 1862, edited by a doctor from Aprigliano, Luigi Gallucci, together with those of his Donato cousins: three priests who specialised in lampoons and were called in the village the gapulieri, the fault-finders.