Santa Domenica Talao

The second half of the name is a river: the Lao, which runs below here and which the Greeks called Làos, like the ancient city of Laos, a colony of the Sybarites mentioned by Strabo and Pliny; Talao would come from the contraction of katà Làos, «near the Lao». The village, on the other hand, is not ancient: the name Santa Domenica appears in a list of the lands of the kingdom of Naples in 1563, but the community proper was built on purpose, in the seventeenth century, by the Spinelli princes of Scalea, who wanted the pastures and woods along the river turned into fields. In the twenties of that century the prince had the first houses raised, handed out plots and called in families from Mormanno and the nearby villages, encouraging them with feasts and concessions. A document of the Regia Camera della Sommaria of 1651 already records the hamlet, with some sixty hearths to be taxed; in 1662 the church of San Giuseppe became a parish.

In the eighteenth century the village reached about three thousand people, and in 1799 it split between those who stood with the Republic and those with the Bourbons. Then, in the twentieth century, it emptied — but towards an unexpected place: besides the Americas of always, a great many of its people ended up in the Dominican Republic, at Puerto Plata, at Santiago, at La Vega, where they opened shops and businesses. In 1917, at Puerto Plata, they founded the Società Pro-Santa Domenica Talao to send money home and support charitable works in the village; their descendants still keep in touch, and in 2022 the comune signed a twinning with Santo Domingo. The mother church, enlarged in 1701 by the architect Bilotta, has a high altar of polychrome marble of 1774. In the arms there is a vine shoot with a ripe bunch of grapes, clinging to a young olive tree.