San Demetrio Corone has 3,665 inhabitants on the hills that climb from the plain of Sybaris towards the Sila Greca, and at home people speak Albanian: it is one of the main centres of the Arbëria, founded by the exiles who fled the Balkans before the Ottoman advance. The welcome is on the record: in the capitulations of 1471 the archimandrite Paolo Greco went to the notary to put in writing the undertaking to receive the Albanian refugees in the hamlet of San Demetrio and to let them farm its lands. The "Corone" was added in 1863, in memory of Korone, the town in the Morea from which the second diaspora had come.
The Albanians settled around the oratory of Sant'Adriano, where in the tenth century Saint Nilus of Rossano had withdrawn to pray inside a cave. Out of that monastery came the College of Sant'Adriano: set up by pope Clement XII in 1732 to train the clergy of the Byzantine rite, moved here in 1794, it was the first institute of learning in Calabria, and out of its classrooms came the Risorgimento patriots Agesilao Milano and Domenico Mauro and, above all, Girolamo De Rada, born in the hamlet of Macchia Albanese, who is the father of modern Albanian literature.
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📅 Every year, on 26 October, with a three-day fair
San Demetrio Corone celebrates Saint Demetrius the Great Martyr on 26 October, with a three-day fair. Since 1980, the town has hosted the Arbëreshë Song Festival, dedicated to the music of Italy's Albanian communities.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside San Demetrio Corone, but an easy day trip away.
