Bocchigliero

Around 1870 a local religious movement was born at Bocchigliero, at first within Catholicism and then decidedly heretical, which called itself the Saints of Bocchigliero. It lasted about ten years, and it ended as such things ended: its leaders were tried and condemned. It is an affair that says a great deal about these villages of the Sila, where religion has never been a lukewarm matter. A little higher up, at nine hundred and thirty metres, stands the sanctuary of San Rocco, built after the plague of 1723 which had reached this place too. When cholera got into the village, the people entrusted themselves to the saint: from the twenty-first of August no more deaths were recorded, and in September, out of gratitude, the church was enlarged and decorated, with the ceiling painted in false coffers and a canvas of the saint at its centre. Since 1836 the comune had obtained from the king of Naples the right to solemnise the feast with a fair, and still today, in the days around the twenty-first of August, the procession and the torchlight procession draw thousands of pilgrims.

On the name the hypotheses pile up. Some go back to the Bruttian city of Arento; others to a Roman-age Bocchilierus, which would mean a village inhabited by shepherds — a simple and believable explanation, given the trade. Then there is a third trail, which professor Alberto Puglisi advanced after finding here, in 1934, material of Roman date: according to him the dialect name Vuccugliari would come from Arabic and the village would even have been founded by Hannibal. It is a hypothesis that the sources themselves give as uncertain, and it is best reported as such. The mother church, built after 1580, has a crenellated bell tower that was made out of an old watchtower. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth people left here for the United States, Brazil and Argentina; then, from the fifties to the early seventies, the emigration became almost seasonal, towards Germany, France and Switzerland, and what stayed in the village was a community made mostly of women and children. In the countryside there are the remains of a Bruttian necropolis and Neolithic caves, the Giumenta-San Salvatore nature reserve and the Santa Croce ravine with its cave of butterflies.