Mongrassano

Mongrassano is a village that can be read like a map: its zones say who arrived first and who arrived later. Today the built-up area is held to be divided into five, and the names alone tell the story. «Li Romani» is the oldest settlement and takes its name from the presence of the Italians, as Italian were «La Costa» and «Lo Piano»; «La Sciuria», which in Arbëresh is Shurja, and «Serra di Leo», which is Sardalia, are instead the zones where the Albanians settled. Serra di Leo, indeed, was for centuries a separate casale, with a history of its own and its own barons, and joined the rest only at the beginning of the eighteen hundreds: in 1811 it was merged with Mongrassano, and in 1816 the whole became a comune. The village already existed in the twelfth century, with names that changed with every document — Mons Crasanus, Mocrasani, Moncressano — and in its territory there was a monastery dedicated to Santa Maria of which no trace is left today.

The history of the Albanians of Mongrassano is known above all through taxes. They were already here in 1488, when they had founded the quarter of the Sciuria and were taxed twenty ducats for it; four years later they were simply no longer counted. Then in 1543 came a fiscal census covering all forty-four Albanian casali of Calabria Citeriore, and for Mongrassano it gives sixty-three fuochi, that is households, for one hundred and ninety-four inhabitants — with the list of surnames the royal counters set down in writing: Arrigoni, Capparello, Cingaro, Drames, Lo Russo, Migliano, Mosciara, Petta, Rotundo, Smilara, Tabularo and Yerbes. Of the later censuses only the totals survive, and they tell a hard story: by 1669, when the plague had come back, the households were down to forty-three. The Arbëresh language, with time, has almost entirely disappeared here — while a few kilometres away, at San Benedetto Ullano, it is still spoken.