Montegiordano

On the hill of Menzinara, between 1980 and 1981, a Lucanian farmhouse was excavated that was in use through the whole second half of the fourth century before Christ. It was square, twenty-two metres a side, with seven rooms set around an open courtyard and an L-shaped corridor leading out; the walls rested on a base of dry-laid river pebbles and were of mud brick, and on the west side of the courtyard the eaves tiles ended in lions' heads. And it is possible to say what the rooms were for. On the east side a cellar: a square sandstone press, fragments of great storage jars and of amphorae. On the north side the kitchen: a hearth in the corner, table pottery, iron firedogs and knife blades. And about eighty-five loom weights, which is to say a loom.

The old village stood down at Piano delle Rose, three kilometres from the sea, and there was a castle there too, of which nothing certain is known because the Turkish raids destroyed it. Being that close to the coast made the people an easy target, and in the end they left, taking refuge inland, at Oriolo and in the villages around. But they did not forget the place. In 1649 the marquis of Oriolo, Alessandro Pignone del Carretto — pleased with the rents another new village of his was already yielding — granted a group of shepherds and farmers the land of Calopardo for twenty ducats a year; and there they built a new village and gave it the old name, Montegiordano. Popular history says instead that the name came from a priest called Giordano. That the coast was dangerous had been known for a long time: a charter of 1015 records that a monk named Nicone and his son Ursulo, turmarch of Oriolo, gave a castle to the abbot of Sant'Anania precisely so that the monks and the people could withdraw into it when the raids came.