Sant'Ilario dello Ionio

The arms of Sant'Ilario dello Ionio look like two coats of arms put together, those of the Carafa and the old ones of Condojanni, and in all likelihood that is exactly what they are. They tell how the village came about: according to the chronicle of the diocese of Gerace it was founded by the Carafa of Roccella at the end of the sixteenth century, and at the end of the seventeenth, having grown fast, it broke away from Condojanni and became a township of its own. Condojanni is now one of its hamlets, with the old Norman castle, and the comune is made of three separate settlements: the old borgo, the centre and the Marina. The earthquake of 1908 flattened almost all of it and it was rebuilt; palazzo Vitale, which is the town hall, palazzo Speziali Carbone and villa Speziali, of the first half of the nineteenth century, are still there.

The great feast is that of Sant'Ilarione Abate, on the last Sunday of October: an old feast, which once fell together with the broaching of the new wine and the killing of the pig. On Maundy Thursday the parish church sets up the Sepulchre and hundreds of people come to it in pilgrimage. Two other rites, though, are gone, and it was the parish priests who stopped them: the affruntata of Easter Sunday, in which Saint John went to announce to the Madonna that her son had risen and in the square her black veil was exchanged for a blue cloth, was suppressed at the end of the seventies as being pagan; the procession of the Addolorata on Good Friday, which crossed the village in an astonishing silence, was abolished in 2011.