Cardeto

The name comes from the thistle — carditum, a place of thistles — or, others say, from the Roman cardo. The village was probably born between the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the Byzantines, to meet the Arab threat, had fortifications built inland, the kastra that here they call motte: one was Motta Sant'Agata, of which Cardeto was a casale until 1783, and that is why the village is still divided into Sopra Casale and Sotto Casale. It was probably the people of Sant'Agata themselves who, looking for a safer place, pushed inland and founded it. At Serra there are the ruins of a fortification the people call the Saracen tower, and from there you see the strait. In 1595 the archbishop of Reggio came on a pastoral visit and found about three hundred souls; the parish priest was called Giuseppe Bova and the document calls him a Greek. The comune became fully autonomous in 1806.

Here Greek was spoken and mass was said in Greek, and for three centuries travellers and scholars went on measuring how much of it was left. In 1571 Barrio wrote that the inhabitants used Latin and Greek in ordinary speech, but did divine service in the Greek tongue and the Greek rite; thirty years later Marafioti said the same of the two casali of Sant'Agata. In the middle of the seventeen hundreds Rodotà noted that at Cardeto and at Montebello Greek still prevailed over Italian. In 1820 a German traveller wrote that here a certain corrupt Greek is spoken, that this is the first village on that side of the province where Greek and Italian are both spoken, and that few speak the first. At the census of 1881, the first survey of minorities after unification, the whole population was still recorded as Greek: a generalisation already out of date, because within forty years the Greekness here would be entirely submerged. The earthquakes of 1783 and 1908 and a flood of the last century wrecked the two churches; the one of San Sebastiano, the patron, was reopened for good only in 2000.