The municipality is the sum of two villages, united in 1863, and the name is a sum as well. Belvedere is said to go back to the fortress Robert Guiscard had built in a commanding position over the Neto valley while preparing the siege of Siberene, today Santa Severina; Spinello, instead, recalls Carlo Ferrante Spinelli, captain general of Calabria in the time of Charles the Fifth. The coat of arms too is a sum: from Belvedere Malapezza comes a hillock with a raven, the shield of the condottiero to whom the Aragonese assigned the fief in 1471; from Monte Spinello a hillock topped by a spino, a star-shaped throwing weapon.
Above the village stands the sanctuary of the Madonna della Scala, Norman and Basilian in plan, with rock-cut niches used as burials beside it and a hermitage probably of the tenth century, a trace of Italo-Greek monasticism. In the park grows an oak of about four hundred years, twenty metres high with a trunk of four. That park, however, is tended from a long way off: for some thirty years the emigrants from Belvedere who live at Glen Cove, in the state of New York, have funded its upkeep through a foundation named after the Madonna, and in 2023 a monument dedicated to those very emigrants was unveiled there.
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📅 Every year, on the first Tuesday of June
Belvedere di Spinello celebrates the Madonna della Pietà on the first Tuesday of June. Since 1983, on 25 April, a livestock fair known throughout Calabria has been held at Timpa del Salto.
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The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Belvedere di Spinello, but an easy day trip away.
