Sant'Agata del Bianco

The year 1847 is the one Sant'Agata remembers twice. In Palazzo Borgia the young Rocco Verduci met with his fellow villagers to set off the rising of the district of Gerace, the Mazzinian conspiracy of that summer: it ended badly, and Verduci is one of the five martyrs shot at Gerace. On 6 August of the same year Edward Lear, the English painter and writer, came through, a guest of the De Franco family: he sat down and drew the village, with the two-storey baronial palace and the church of San Nicola behind it.

Saverio Strati was born here in 1924, one of the great Calabrian storytellers of the twentieth century, who wrote about emigration and about the poverty of this land. Of the earthquake of 1783 it is still told that at the first shock, on 5 February, a beam of the mother church came down and was held up by the arm of the statue of Saint Agatha, and that this saved the congregation. In 1927 Fascism erased the municipality into a new body, San Giovanni Samio, together with Samo, Casignana and Caraffa del Bianco: Sant'Agata became independent again in 1946.