Bruzzano Zeffirio

The name puts two things together: the Bruzio promontory, or the people of the Bruttii, and Zephyrus, the gentle wind that makes the climate of the area mild and that, so it is said, brought the Greeks to land at capo Bruzzano. In antiquity the place was called Bursana — so the Arab cartographers write it — and in medieval Armenian Bur sa nan, which is said to mean «everything is perfumed»: a name explained by the rock on which the old village stood, and which is still called Rocca Armenia, the Armenian rock. It is a monolith of compact sandstone, with a flat top at one hundred and thirty-nine metres, and up there are the ruins of the castle, founded according to tradition by the troops of the emperor Nikephoros Phokas the elder in the ninth century; by 925 it had become the headquarters of the Saracens. From 1270 to 1806 the fief changed hands a dozen times, from the De Brayda to the marquises Ruffo, to the Marullo, to the Aragona de Ajerbe, and finally to the Carafa of Roccella.

The earthquakes did the rest. The one of 1783 damaged the village, those of 1905 and 1908 reduced it to rubble; after the last, the inhabitants came down into the valley and rebuilt everything from scratch, on a modern orthogonal plan, leaving old Bruzzano up above with its ruins. The territory is full of springs: there are the small baths of San Phantino and the acqua Munda, which rises at the foot of the hamlet of Motticella and is renowned for its properties. The deepest devotion is that of the Madonna della Catena, and it has a precise story: the alabaster statue — the Virgin with the Child in her arms and a little dark-skinned figure chained at her feet — was found inside a chest on the beach of capo Bruzzano by the fishermen. They loaded it on an ox-drawn cart to carry it up to the village, but at the boundary between Bruzzano and Ferruzzano the oxen stopped and would go no further: it was understood that the Madonna wanted her church there.