Rota Greca

Rota already appears in 849 in a Lombard list; the «Greca» was added after Italian unification, both to keep it apart from the other Rotas and because the Albanians who had repopulated it followed the Greek rite, and for the rite people took them for Greeks. The arms say both things: a golden wheel of eight spokes and, above, the black eagle.

Here, though, unlike the villages around it, Arbëresh did not survive: what is left is a few place-names and a few old songs in Greek that the young no longer know. In the Migliani quarter there is a garden for Angelo de Fiore, born here, a deputy police chief in Rome, who during the war saved a number of Jews: his name is among the Righteous in Jerusalem.