San Sosti

In 1846, near San Sosti, a richly decorated bronze axe-head was found: a votive offering, with an inscription in the Achaean dialect of ancient Greek that dates it to the sixth century before Christ and dedicates it to Hera, naming a sanctuary that stood down in the plain. The axe passed to the collector and goldsmith Alessandro Castellani and from him, in 1884, to the British Museum, where it still is and where it is known as the axe of San Sosti. It probably came from one of the sanctuaries of this territory: excavations have brought to light an archaic Greek place of worship inside the church of the Carmine, in the middle of the village, and other material of the sixth and fifth centuries at the castle of the Rocca, connected in all likelihood first with Sybaris and then with Thurii. The ridge has been inhabited since the middle Bronze Age, and in protohistoric times a whole system of fortified settlements watched the routes towards the Tyrrhenian.

The name comes from a saint by way of a monastery: the Byzantine monastery of San Sozonte stood here, and from the Greek name of its titular saint the village took its own, which in the Middle Ages was written Santa Sosta. The castle of the Rocca, raised in the tenth or eleventh century at the mouth of the gorge, was abandoned between the thirteenth and the fourteenth century; on the mountain beyond the Rosa torrent, at Casalini, a Byzantine fortified citadel is still standing in good condition. The sanctuary of the Madonna del Pettoruto was founded in 1274 by the monks of Acquaformosa and rebuilt after the earthquake of 1783; in 1448 a group of Albanians came to settle here. In the streets of the old centre, among the noble palaces and the churches, the Bourbon prison is still there. And in these landscapes a documentary was filmed about Caterina Tufarelli Palumbo Pisani, the first woman mayor in Italy: the places of the comune framed her story.