Feroleto della Chiesa

The first part of the name may come from the ferula, the wild plant that grows here in quantity, or from the Latin ferrum, on account of some mineral presence. The second part is a piece of documented history: della Chiesa was added in the Middle Ages to tell the village apart from other places of the same name, and it refers to the granting of the fief to the metropolitan Church of Messina by the emperor Henry VI, in 1197. The village carries in its own surname, then, the name of the institution that owned it, and that ownership shaped the running of the place for centuries. It ended in 1522, when the archbishopric of Messina ceded Feroleto to Camillo Pignatelli, and the village passed from a church to one of the most influential families of the kingdom of Naples.

Where the village began is not documented: perhaps the Bruttii; or else, by another account, refugees from Tauriana, the coastal town destroyed in the ninth century by Saracen raids, who sought shelter inland — the same flight that, in those same years, brought the Basilian monks to Galatro, a few kilometres from here. Two earthquakes marked the place, that of 1638 and above all that of 1783, which did heavy damage and killed many, so that part of the built-up area was rebuilt in a neighbouring spot. Then came the nineteenth century, with emigration and a slow modernisation. At the beginning of the twentieth century this was wine country, and most of the land was under vines; they also grew maize, cereals and peanuts. Today it is olives for oil, and oranges, mandarins and lemons. Seven people out of ten here still speak dialect as their everyday language.