Mormanno

Mormanno has 3,264 inhabitants at 820 metres, inside the Pollino park. The name may come from the arimanni, the mercenaries of Germanic origin who were allowed to settle in this territory between the gastaldate of Laino and the fortress of Papasidero: mons arimannorum. A life of Saint Leoluca, who came here to meditate, calls the place "in montibus Miromanorum". The mother church, Neapolitan baroque consecrated in 1790, has a façade that works as a diagram of the town: on its three doorways are the arms of the three confraternities, the Blessed Sacrament in the middle, the Agonizzanti on the left, the Souls of Purgatory on the right.

On Monte San Michele, instead, there is something you do not expect in the mountains: a lighthouse. The Faro Votivo, raised in 1928 for the Calabrian soldiers who fell in the First World War, is one of the very few mountain lighthouses in Italy, and it is also a shrine, keeping the memory of the region's eleven gold medals for military valour. But what makes it a fact about Mormanno is how it was paid for: a committee collected the money from most of the comuni of Calabria and from the committees of Calabrians who had emigrated abroad. A whole region, including the part of itself that had left, built a light on a mountain.