A story handed down from father to son explains the name. A rich merchant, passing with servants and horses through the district called Vaccaro, stopped beside the shepherds' huts and asked them who they were and what they were doing; they answered that they were pasturing their master's animals, and the merchant replied «Bene facite», you do well. The shepherds, who had never heard Latin, were left dumbfounded by those two words, and from that day they began to call the place benefacite, and then benefate. Tradition also has it that the village was built by refugees from the ancient city of Hiele, razed by the troops of Robert Guiscard in 1057; about two hundred years later, in 1270, Castel Bonifati is the fief that Charles I of Anjou gave to Gismondo Palmieri in gratitude.
The coast tells another story. The hamlet of Cittadella del Capo was originally a Greek colony called Fella, and lived on farming and fishing until the sixteenth century, when it was taken by the Turks. The towers along the shore keep the count of the centuries: the Torre del Capo is of the twelfth, the Torre Parise of the fifteenth, the Torre di Fella of the sixteenth. Up on the hill remain the ruins of the Norman castle, destroyed by the Angevins, and the church of the Calvario, which holds a Christ carrying the cross painted in 1601 by Dirk Hendricksz and a marble Madonna and Child by Giandomenico Mazzolo, given in 1535 by Pietrantonio Sanseverino, prince of Bisignano.
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📅 Every year, on 22 July; Our Lady of the Rosary on the first Sunday of October
Bonifati celebrates Saint Mary Magdalene on 22 July. On the first Sunday of October, the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary is celebrated, and in the hamlet of Cittadella del Capo, on the third Sunday of August, that of Saint Francis of Paola.
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The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
