Caccuri

Caccuri sits perched on a spur of rock, and all its streets lead to the castle, a manor that goes back to the sixth century and was built over a Byzantine fortress. Of that castle what can be seen from a distance today is a single tower, the Torre Mastrigli, which is the symbol of the town: most of the rest is in a state of decay. In the old centre the streets climb and drop between the rock ridges, winding, and every so often they open out into the rughe: little squares onto which the door of every house faces and which were once the place where people stood together. The ways into the borgo were three — Porta Grande, Porta Piccola and Porta Nuova, so called because it came after the other two — and one street is still called via Judeca, where a synagogue stood, as the bas-reliefs suggest. Two threads leading to the Sforza pass through this village: Caccuri was the fief of Polissena Ruffo, wife of Francesco Sforza, and her room can still be seen in the castle; and here was born Cicco Simonetta, who would be the Sforza's man in Milan.

The mother church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, damaged by the earthquakes of 1638 and of 1808, lost in a restoration the frescoes that adorned its vault, with their putti and cherubim; the bell tower was saved, and it keeps a bell of 1578 dedicated to the Madonna, which the Università di Caccuri commissioned from Angelo Rinaldi. The abbey of Santa Maria del Soccorso, which in the village they simply call the convent, was founded in 1518 by the Dominican friar Andrea da Gimigliano; the friars left it only at the end of the eighteen hundreds, when the building was sold to baron Barracco under the Siccardi laws. Outside the built-up area, at the place called Timpa dei Santi, there are rock caves with paintings of the Byzantine age, above a settlement of the Bronze Age. And about every seven years, during Holy Week, the village stages the drama of the Giudei: the last time was in 2011.