Placanica

Placanica stands on a hill between the Precariti torrent and the Càstore stream, a short way from the Ionian sea, and until 1816 it was called Motta Placanica: motta means a fortified height, and the walls probably came in the days of Enrico Ruffo, who in 1310 was its feudal lord. The castle, though, is older: it was built in 1283 by the Arcadi family. In 1333 the village was already called Motta Placanica, and in that year the documents record something one usually does not get to know: there was a community of Jews — iudeis Placanicae — who paid the feudal lord Guglielmo Ruffo the dues on the lands they owned, and of some of them the names have remained: Saydonus, Farionus, Farachi, Aronus. Placanica also had its own assembly, the Universitas Civium, a true public parliament with deliberative power, made up of all the male heads of household between eighteen and sixty-five years of age.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are a list of sales. In 1570, to pay the debts of Cola Antonio Caracciolo, the barony was sold for thirty-three thousand ducats to Domenico De Licandro of Messina, whose son was soon in a lawsuit with the Placanica parliament, accused of having brought the plague into the village. In 1645 the son of Girolamo Passerelli, also deep in debt, had to sell Placanica to the convent of San Domenico of Soriano for thirty thousand ducats; and in 1654 the convent sold it on to Francesca Musitano for twenty-nine thousand five hundred. The earthquakes of 1783 did damage here worth twenty thousand ducats, bringing down towers, houses, mills and above all churches. In the church of San Basilio Magno a tabernacle by the Gagini is kept. The women, local history tells, worked the fields, spun and wove; and before marrying they went to the notary with their parents to draw up with the future husband the marriage chapters, where everything they brought as dowry was listed. Today, in the hamlet of Santa Domenica, thousands of pilgrims come to venerate the Madonna dello Scoglio.