Santa Maria del Cedro

The town changed its name twice in thirteen years. Until 1955 it was called Cipollina, which sounds like a little onion but most probably means something else: the place on this side of the Pollino, cis-Pollino. Then it was Santa Maria, and only since 1968 has it been Santa Maria del Cedro; and it had been a hamlet of Grisolia until 1948. The place was born in the seventeenth century out of the people driven from Abatemarco, the village destroyed by a flood of the river of the same name: the original nucleus was a casale, a small cluster of houses where the main square now is. It was a fief of the Brancati of Naples until the unification of Italy.

The citron grown here, the smooth diamante variety, is for Jews the most prized cultivar there is: every year rabbis come to Santa Maria del Cedro to choose the fruits — the etrog — fit for the rites of Sukkot, the feast of Tabernacles, which under Jewish law must be free of certain imperfections. The citron museum is housed in the so-called Carcere dell'Impresa, an old workshop of the fifteenth or sixteenth century that long belonged to the Sollazzo. On the hill of Palecastro — from the Greek for «old castle» — in the hamlet of Marcellina lie instead the remains of the Greek city of Laos: digging is hard because the town of today has grown directly on top of it. The coat of arms granted in 1958 sets the three things side by side: the face of the Madonna, a citron fruit and a Greek column, with the sea behind.