Rovito lies on the south-western slopes of the Sila Grande, a few kilometres from Cosenza, and is scattered into seven hamlets set between three hundred and seven hundred metres. Tommaso Cornelio was born here, one of the leading figures of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution in the Kingdom of Naples. The parish church is Santa Barbara, Romanesque-Gothic with the Baroque additions of the restoration of 1630; and among the chestnut trees, just outside the village, stands the little church of the Madonna della Pietà, whose feast falls on the second Sunday of September.
The village's name, though, is bound above all to a place that is not in the village. The Vallone di Rovito lies in the territory of Cosenza, but it carries this name, and it is there that the Bourbon firing squads worked in 1844: on 11 July six Calabrian patriots taken in the Cosenza rising of 15 March were shot there — Pietro Villacci, Antonio Raho, Nicola Corigliano, Giuseppe Franzese, Santo Cesario and Raffaele Camodeca — and on 25 July the Bandiera brothers with seven companions of the expedition that had sailed from Corfu. One of the founding places of the Risorgimento bears the name of Rovito and is not at Rovito.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Rovito
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside Rovito, but an easy day trip away.