Malvito

The name means a place of mallows, malvetum. From 982 a community of Greek-rite monks worked here, at the church of Santa Parasceve, copying liturgical books: some of those copies, unique ones, are now in the Vatican Library and are held to be fine pieces of calligraphy. Malvito was then the seat of a gastaldato and of a bishop, and the castle was begun by the Lombards and finished by the Normans — the fortress is still nearly intact. But at the end of the twelfth century the bishopric went away: San Marco Argentano was too close. In 1497 the inhabitants obtained written statutes from the Sanseverino princes, the first rules they could appeal to when a lord went too far.

What happened to Malvito afterwards is written in its price. In 1622 Elena Falangola sold the barony for eighty thousand ducats. Seven years later the fief changed hands for forty-three thousand; in 1634 for forty thousand; in 1650 it was bought for thirty-eight thousand by Bernardino Telesio, a descendant of the philosopher; and in 1667 it went for twenty-seven thousand. In little more than forty years it had lost two thirds of its value, and then it was auctioned off against the estate of a duke whose title had died with him. The Sambiase held it until the end of feudalism. Above the village, the Passo della Contessa is the old way up from the sea: the Saracens tried to come up it more than once.