San Donato di Ninea

After unification the government invited comuni with identical names to distinguish themselves by changing them, and usually a province or a river was added. The council of San Donato, on 13 December 1863, chose another road: it took the name of a city that no longer exists. Ninea was a settlement founded by the Oenotrians and immediately Grecized, which the geographer Hecataeus of Miletus describes and which tradition places precisely in this territory; since then the village has been called San Donato di Ninea, as established by the royal decree of 18 February 1864. The rest of the name is older: San Donato appears for the first time in a diploma of July 1100, which reconfirmed to the abbey of Santa Maria della Matina the churches in the territory Castelli Sancti Donati, and in 1276 the village, with four hundred and sixty-four inhabitants, was enfeoffed to Filippo Breton.

The end of its feudal house is a lesson in how the law actually worked. In 1654 the last of the Sanseverino of San Donato died: Anna, who was nine years old. The title was declared extinct for want of male descendants in the direct line, although collateral relatives existed and although an ancient Sanseverino privilege, confirmed by Charles V in 1530, laid down that on the extinction of a branch its fiefs and titles should pass to the nearest male of the family. Orazio Sanseverino di Càlvera petitioned the court, but it was no use: the fief went back to the sovereign, was put up for auction and in 1664 knocked down to the Ametrano of Naples, to whom Charles II granted anew the title of duke of San Donato, by a privilege issued at Madrid and executed in 1668. The village, meanwhile, stands where it always stood: clinging to a rocky spur beneath the Cozzo del Pellegrino, with four fifths of its territory in the mountains and heights running from almost two thousand metres down to a hundred and eighty. Monte La Mula, snow-covered for much of the year and with no road across it, still makes it hard to reach Grisolia and Verbicaro, which lie just on the other side. The mother church is called della Motta, which means a rock detached from a mountain: it was built between the end of the tenth century and the beginning of the thirteenth, with a Romanesque façade and a bell tower of Norman-Swabian stamp.