Palizzi

In the territory of Palizzi, near the seaside hamlet, lies the southernmost point of peninsular Italy. In antiquity there was a limit here too: the river Alece, whose name comes from the Greek for salty, separated the territory of Reggio from that of Locri, and scholars still argue whether it was the Amendolea or the fiumara of Palizzi. An honorary archaeologist spent twenty years surveying the sites of one city and of the other, and drew from them a clear line of demarcation; Strabo was already writing about that border. The village's name, by contrast, is simpler: it comes from the Palizzi family.

The castle that dominates Palizzi Superiore is a national monument, and a Latin inscription at its entrance says that in 1580 it was already falling down with age; it was rebuilt by the Colonna in 1751 and enlarged by baron Tiberio de Blasio in 1866, and in the living rock beneath it the prisons are still cut. In the main square, instead, stands a white limestone fountain raised in 1973 to Bruno Misefari, the anarchist of Calabria: set into its rock is a slab of black Belgian marble containing his bones. In the upper part of the municipality a few families still weave broom fibre on their own looms, and there is a distillery of bergamot and jasmine essences.