Colosimi

Colosimi is not a single village: it is a set of eleven small villages, the main one included, scattered over the southern spurs of the Sila, in the valley of the Bisirico, among chestnut woods. Until the first decades of the seventeenth century people came up here only in summer; the permanent inhabitants arrived after the famines and earthquakes of that century, and above all after the shock of 27 March 1638, which pushed many families from Scigliano to move to the hamlets where they already owned land. Before autonomy, which dates from 1811, the history of Colosimi is that of the township of Scigliano; and until 1820 the comune also took in the territory of Bianchi, which broke away in that year.

Being eleven, each has kept its own. Rizzuti, Coraci, Arcuri-Gigliotti and Carrano each had their own parish and kept the feasts, respectively, of Santa Maria delle Grazie in August, of the Holy Trinity, of San Vito and of Santa Barbara. At Carrano the wheat bread is still made in a wood oven shared by everyone. The name of the village comes from the surname Colosimo, very common in these parts, which in turn is traced to the Greek kalosmos, that is, perfumed. In 1813 the Mamertini lodge was founded here, one of the oldest masonic workshops in the area: with the Ginnosofisti silani of Carlopoli and La Sila of Decollatura it was one of the cultural forges of these mountains in the nineteenth century.