Roccaforte del Greco

Roccaforte del Greco stands at a little under a thousand metres, on the southern side of the Aspromonte, inside the Bovesia: the area where the Greek of Calabria was still spoken until yesterday. In that language the village is called Vunì, which means simply the mountain. Its territory is known to geologists for the Colella landslide, a geosite of international importance and one of the largest landslip phenomena in Europe: a mountain that moves, and a village living beside it.

The figures tell the rest. At the census of 1921 Roccaforte had more than two thousand inhabitants; emigration, which set in en masse in the nineteen-sixties, carried off most of them, and by 2025 the residents were fewer than three hundred. For some years now the village has had no schools of its own: the children go down to Bagaladi and San Lorenzo, in the neighbouring comuni, because the regional plan merged the school network. It is a portrait of what happened to the Greek Aspromonte, where the villages emptied one after another and the language stayed in the mouths of a few.