Africo

Africo has 3,210 inhabitants and is a comune in two pieces, a long way apart: the inhabited part is a small enclave on the coast, inside the territory of Bianco, while the original village is up on the Aspromonte, where the ruins of Africo Vecchio and Casalnuovo remain. How it came to this is one of the hardest stories in the south. In 1928 Umberto Zanotti Bianco climbed up here with the young Manlio Rossi Doria and wrote a report on it, published only after the war: an isolated village, with many houses still ruined by the earthquake of 1908, taxed without criterion, with no doctor and no classrooms, so that the second and third elementary years had their lessons together in the schoolmistress's bedroom. For some months of the year people ate a bread made of lentil, chickling and barley flour.

In 1948 the weekly L'Europeo sent Tommaso Besozzi up with the photographer Tino Petrelli, and the reportage showed that in twenty years almost nothing had changed. Then, in October 1951, a flood destroyed both villages, with three dead at Africo and six at Casalnuovo, and the authorities ordered them cleared. More than a thousand people ended up in wooden huts on the outskirts of Reggio Calabria, where most of them stayed until the early sixties, while the new Africo was built by the sea. The move was contested at the time: Zanotti Bianco pointed out that peasants would be cut off from their land and that a community life built over many generations would be taken apart.