San Vincenzo La Costa

The comune has two hamlets, and their names stand on the two opposite sides of the same affair. The first is called San Sisto dei Valdesi, of the Waldensians: around 1200 it began to host a large community of Waldensians arrived from Piedmont, who lived there as labourers and farmers, peacefully and in spite of their faith, until the middle of the sixteenth century; on the twenty-ninth of May 1561 the soldiers of Marino Caracciolo, captain of the viceroyalty of Naples, laid waste to the village, burned the houses and killed hundreds of its people. The second hamlet is called Gesuiti, the Jesuits, and its history begins in the second half of that same century, when during the persecution the Jesuits were sent here to counter what was held to be a heresy. Of that past there remains an old borgo, now private, called il Cortiglio, where a monastery stood that in ancient times was named Villa Expulsorum, the villa of the expelled: a name whose origin, the source warns, remains uncertain all the same.

The village lies on the slopes of the Catena Costiera and looks out over the valley of the Crati. Its origins are medieval — the place appears in a document of 1113 kept in the Vatican archive — and at the start San Vincenzo was only a small monastery, administered each time by whichever feudal lord happened to hold it; an autonomous comune, with its two hamlets, it became only in 1855. Long before all this, however, somebody had buried at Piano Capone a hoard that came to light in 1957: one hundred and seven bronze coins struck by the Lucanian mint, by the Bruttian one, by Syracuse, by the Carthaginians and by Rome. Five powers that in those centuries were fighting one another, ending up together in the same purse; today the coins are in the National Museum of Reggio Calabria.