Galatro

The name probably comes from a Greek word meaning slope, ravine. The village grew in the Middle Ages with refugees from the towns nearby, above all the coastal ones, fleeing the attacks of the Saracen pirates — and the monks came by the same road: after the raids of 915 had destroyed their monastery at Tauriana, the Basilians took refuge on these mountains and built there a new Greek convent dedicated to Saint Elias. Tradition puts their arrival in 1075 and holds that the saint's body was kept here. It was the monks who found the sulphur springs of Monte Livia and spread the use of them; the water still comes out at thirty-seven degrees, a couple of kilometres from the village, inside a narrow gorge, and the spring carries the saint's name. The monastery was abandoned a first time in the fourteenth century, passed to the Capuchins, was damaged by the earthquake of 1783 and suppressed for good in 1808; its remains are at Cubasina.

For centuries the water was used just as it came. Until 1891 patients had to bathe in natural pools near the springs, or in rough wooden vats set up as best they could on the river gravel and screened from the eyes of the curious with flimsy walls of canes and holm-oak branches. The first real bath-house was built by a lawyer, Giovambattista Buda, who managed to draw thousands of sick people a year into the valley; the present one comes from the restoration of the building of 1882. The rest of Galatro lies on the last terraced slopes of the Serre, where two rivers meet, and the Metramo divides it into two nuclei, Magenta and Montebello. The main church stood right on the banks of that river, and every winter the river carried a piece of it away. In San Nicola there are statues of the early fifteen hundreds attributed to the school of the Gagini and a marble Saint Nicholas of the fourteen hundreds.