Longobucco

Longobucco has 3,479 inhabitants in a valley of the Sila Greca, and it is the fourth largest comune in Calabria by area. The name is Latin, longa bucca, "long hollow", but it translates a Greek one: the torrent alongside was called makrokoilos, the long cavity. In the late Middle Ages silver was dug here, and it was the most important mine in the Kingdom of Naples: it stopped holding up when silver began to arrive from the Americas.

In 1487 Ferrante of Aragon made a present of the county of Longobucco to Ludovico il Moro, who held it together with his wife Beatrice d'Este. Then it was brigand country — one of them called himself King Coremme — and under fascism some Ethiopian dignitaries who had opposed Italian colonialism were sent here into internal exile. Of what the town knew how to do, the looms remain: wool, cotton and silk are still woven here by hand, with old designs, and there is a museum of Sila craftsmanship in the former Franciscan convent. In the fifties the inhabitants were more than eight thousand.