Varapodio

The village came into being around 951 in a place three kilometres from where it stands today, still called Il Salvatore: it was founded by people who had left the coast to escape the raids from the sea. Its name has changed shape five times. At first it was Marrapodi, from a Greek word that some read as «heavy-footed» and that another scholar connects instead with the river Marro, which runs below; then it became Barapodi in the mouths of the Greek-speaking Christians who lived here; then the Latin Baropedium between the fourteenth and the sixteenth century; then Varapodi; and finally, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Varapodio. In dialect, however, people still say Varapodi. Around 1600 the settlement began to move to its present site, where the Augustinians already had their convent, and on the fourth of May 1811 a decree made it an autonomous comune. Its coat of arms, unusually, has never had an official grant.

From the end of the nineteenth century, and much more after the Second World War, families from Varapodio left for the farmland along the Murray River, in the Australian state of Victoria, and settled at Cobram: in time they and their descendants built there an Italo-Australian community so deeply rooted that some people call the place Little Varapodio, and the influence of the home town can still be seen in local traditions and family networks. Others went to northern Italy, to the United States, to Canada and to the Australian cities. What has stayed is agriculture: oil, citrus fruit, vegetables and fruit, with family-run workshops and a few plants that process the citrus. The village lies on the northern spurs of the Aspromonte, where the Calabrò torrent runs into the river Marro, on the edge of the plain of Gioia Tauro.