Molochio

The name is a plant. Molochio comes from the Greek molochion, mallow, of which the area was once so full that the village looked like a garden of mallows; the Italianised form is barely a century old, and before that it was said and written mulóçi. There are two hypotheses about the origin of the settlement: an Italic settlement of the Iron Age, or the arrival of refugees from Taureana, Metauro and Scunno who, in the tenth century, to escape the Saracen raids, took shelter under the walls of the Basilian monastery that stood up here.

In 1901 Molochio inaugurated the first sanctuary in Italy dedicated to the Madonna of Lourdes. It had been begun in 1890 by father Francesco Maria Zagari, a Capuchin who had gone on pilgrimage to Lourdes shortly after the apparitions; to obtain a statue he travelled as far as Paris, and came back with a wooden one, given to him by a Franciscan tertiary. The village is also known for something else: it has one of the highest concentrations of centenarians in the world. The waterfalls of Mundu and Galasia are reached by a path of the mid-nineteenth century that once served the charcoal burners moving from one village to another.