San Lorenzo

Garibaldi's landing at Melito was decided by what happened here. In August 1860 two hundred and fifty garibaldini who had landed at Scilla, their assault on the fort of Altafiumara having failed, were hunted across the Aspromonte; the mayor of San Lorenzo, signor Rossi, went to find them and invited them up to the village «for life and for death», as Alberto Mario wrote in La Camicia Rossa. On the eighteenth of August the intendant of Reggio was already reporting to Naples a band of about two hundred armed men in the comune of San Lorenzo.

Garibaldi was waiting at Giardini di Taormina with the steamers Torino and Franklin; learning that that stretch of the Aspromonte was held by his own men and by the people of San Lorenzo, he landed at Melito on the night between the eighteenth and the nineteenth. As soon as he was ashore he sent a courier at a gallop with four words: «Sbarcai a Melito. Venite». Bruno Rossi and the men of San Lorenzo came down and set off with him to take Reggio, while Melito had stayed out of it. The old centre, seat of a magistrate's court until the first half of the twentieth century, has since emptied; at Chorio stands the birthplace of Gaetano Catanoso, and in the sanctuary of the Cappella there is an icon of a Black Madonna, probably of the twelfth century.