Cerchiara di Calabria

The comune runs from eight metres above the sea to two thousand two hundred and sixty-seven, the summit of Serra Dolcedorme, the highest mountain in Calabria: a difference of more than two thousand two hundred metres, the greatest of the four hundred and four comuni of the region. Below, there is as much again: the abyss of the Fossa del Lupo, also called Bifurto, goes down six hundred and eighty-three metres and has been the set of a film. According to some theories Cerchiara rose where a Greek settlement stood, Arponion, which tradition links to Epeius: it was he, they say, who took from the woods of Monte Sellaro the timber to build the Trojan horse.

The coat of arms tells the village's story: a deer against the profile of Monte Sellaro, for the legend that in 1450 some hunters followed a doe into a cave and found two miraculous icons there; an oak and the letter Q, for the old name of the place, Querciara. On Monte Sellaro, hermit monks of Greek origin had their cells as early as the tenth century, and in the fifteenth the sanctuary of the Madonna delle Armi was built around a slab of stone bearing an image of the Virgin held not to have been painted by human hand; set against the rock face, the church came out asymmetrical. In the Norman age a document in Greek kept at the abbey of Cava dei Tirreni records that in 1175 Cerchiara was governed by the strategoto Ruggero Carrano: a Norman lord with a Byzantine title. Outside the village, the sulphur spring of the Grotta dei Bagni — renamed in 1959 the cave of the Nymphs — has yielded Roman lamps and coins and still feeds a thermal pool.