Orsomarso

The name of the village is a man's. During the wars between Goths and Byzantines, at the meeting of the rivers Argentino and Porta La Terra, a fortress was built to defend the abbeys of the Basilian monks, and one of its commanders was called Ursus Martius, Orso Marso: the village grew around that fortress and took his name. The mountains, in their turn, took their name from the village: the Orsomarso chain is the south-western expansion of the Pollino national park. On the steep slopes of the Montea, which reaches 1825 metres, grows the loricate pine, which in Italy is found only in this park and which bears witness to an ancient link between southern Italy and the Balkans: during the ice ages the bed of the Adriatic was not wholly submerged, and plants and animals crossed. There are also the wolf, the otter and the golden eagle, and the waters of the Argentino torrent are known for their purity.

The village did not grow by degrees but in small knots around the monasteries and the palaces; and of the most important of those knots almost nothing remains. The church of Santa Maria di Mércuri, of the tenth century, is the only witness of the vanished settlement of Mercourion and of the hermitages that surrounded it: a single nave, a semicylindrical apse, and along the walls the masonry benches on which the Greek monks sat. The saints who passed this way are listed by name: Nilo, Leone Luca, Saba, Primo, Fantino the Younger, Macario. Of the castle of Mercurion, known from the beginning of the fourteenth century, ruins remain. Then came the fiefs: sequestered from Barnaba Sanseverino in 1498, given in dowry, passed in 1538 to the Tomacello, in 1640 to the Ametrano and in 1668 to the Brancati of Naples, who lived in the baronial castle under the clock tower. When feudalism fell, the village took an active part in the struggles of the Risorgimento, after suffering harsh reprisals from the Bourbon commander Necco. And far from here, in Colombia, a football club carries the name of this village.