Cinquefrondi

The name is a sum: between 1370 and 1389 count Antonio Caracciolo of Gerace united five villages and called them Quinquefrondium; according to another explanation the five would instead be the towers that girdled the fortification. Earlier still, tradition says, there were two pagan temples here, one of them dedicated to the Muses, so that for a time the place was called in Latin Templum Musarum. Around the fourth century a monastery of Basilian monks was built, abandoned in the seventh and then used on and off until 1783, when the earthquake destroyed it and razed the town. Of that earthquake the sources record one precise oddity: the hamlet of Giffuni perished, the Giffuni torrent disappeared and in its place a small lake appeared. Every old palace in Cinquefrondi dates from after that year.

The thing that is most its own, though, is seen on the second Sunday of September, for the feast of San Rocco. In front of the houses people build the deserti: shelters of boards and poles lined inside with reeds woven with river plants, within which the stages of the saint's life are staged, the retreat into the cave, the miraculous spring, the care of the plague-stricken, the prison, the church. Sometimes children appear in them dressed as prisoners or as the sick. In the procession some walk barefoot with the pajjaredi on their heads, bells of thorns shaped like a haystack; and during the novena it is the children who go round with painted trays to collect the money for the fireworks.