Santa Caterina Albanese

Santa Caterina Albanese is a fifteenth-century Albanian colony: the exiles who came from Albania after the Ottoman invasion of the Balkans stopped in the Prato district, near the former Cistercian abbey of Santa Maria della Matina, where there was an uninhabited hamlet perhaps called Piesileum. They turned the name into Albanian as Picilia, and that is still the village's name in Arbëresh. Later many Arvanites joined them, that is Albanians coming from the Morea, when that too fell into Turkish hands. The territory passed in 1578 to the Bruno family, then to the Hortado and finally to the Sanseverino of Saponara, who held it until the abolition of feudal tenure in 1806. In 1928 the comune was annexed to Fagnano Castello, and it took until 1934 — after socio-political and cultural battles, as its own history says — to become autonomous again. Here Arbëresh is spoken, and the traditional Albanian costume is still worn on feast days.

From this village of little more than a thousand people came Francesco Antonio Santori, papàs, that is a priest of the Greek rite, born in 1819 and dead in 1894: poet and writer, he wrote the first drama of modern Albanian literature, and his name stands among those of the Albanian national awakening. The village is gathered on the slope of a hill between the valleys of the Esaro and the Ricosoli stream, at four hundred and seventy metres: the lanes are cobbled and crossed by arches, and in the upper part stands the mother church of San Nicola Magno, in baroque style. From there begins via San Pantaleone, which leads to the chapel of the martyr of Nicomedia, built around 1600; San Pantaleone is the patron and is celebrated on the twenty-seventh of July, while on the fifteenth of August the Assumption is celebrated in the Pianette district, down on the plain.