San Mauro Marchesato

The entry on this village contains a sentence worth quoting as it stands: the most accepted thesis about the origin of the name is, says the source, implausible. It would run like this: the toponym would come from some Mauritanians in Hannibal's train, who arrived here at the end of a flight together with some prisoners of the Carthaginian commander. It is rare for an explanation to be at once the most widespread and the least credible, and for whoever reports it to say so openly. The saint of the first half of the name, on the other hand, is in the coat of arms, adopted by the municipal council in the nineteen-seventies: at the top is San Mauro, an abbot, in the act of blessing. In the village the church of the Madonna del Soccorso has a dome restored in 1998.

The second half of the name, instead, is a land. The Marchesato is a historical region of Calabria, in the province of Crotone, and San Mauro stands exactly in the middle of it. Originally the word meant the strip of territory between the rivers Tacina and Neto; today it is usually widened as far as the Lipuda torrent and even beyond. It is the easternmost land in all Calabria: its farthest tip is the promontory of Capo Colonna, where the Greek temple of Hera Lacinia stood. It is made of low hills, on average a couple of hundred metres, with some flat ground near the river mouths; between Roccabernarda and Cutro the badlands open out, crossed by an old road that the documents call the Viam Veteram. And at Zinga there are salt diapirs, which someone has called the custodians of the history of the Mediterranean, because inside them are preserved the traces of that sea during the Messinian salinity crisis.