Laino Borgo

Two things in this village stage the same story. The first is built: two kilometres from the town, on a sacred mount dedicated to the Madonna dello Spasimo, stand sixteen chapels, begun in 1557 by Domenico Longo, a man of Laino just back from Jerusalem, and decorated in stages over the centuries that followed. The second is acted: on Good Friday the village performs the Giudaica, the Passion of Christ, with more than a hundred people in period costume, in places set up all over the town, for a whole day, up to the crucifixion. The script comes from an anonymous text of the sixteen hundreds, the first recorded performance is of the twentieth of April 1832, and it has been done ever since, normally every second year, with the audience following on foot as the scene moves.

Between 1940 and 1943 Laino was one of the fourteen Calabrian comuni designated by the fascist authorities to receive Jewish refugees in civil internment. Seven of them were here, and the papers say where they came from: two from Albania, one Pole who had been living in Milan since 1935, and four who had come from Bratislava to Rhodes aboard a river boat, the Pentcho, and from there had been taken to the camp at Ferramonti and then up here. They were all freed with the arrival of the Allied army, in September 1943, except one: Margit Strelinger, who died of natural causes at Ferramonti on the fourteenth of February 1943. The name of the village, on the other hand, is far older: it comes from the river Lao, and the river from the Greek city of Laüs — which, according to recent excavations in a district of Laino, may first have stood right here, over some forty hectares, before its inhabitants went down towards the sea.