Arena

On the arms of Arena there is neither a saint nor a generic tower: there is a tower from which an archer leans out and aims his arrow at a lion set at the base. It is the exact instant of a defence, frozen in heraldry. The tower, for that matter, exists: the Norman castle of the eleventh century is the oldest building in the village, largely rebuilt by the Conclubet between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and modified by the Acquaviva dukes; the earthquake of 1783 destroyed it, and today part of the corner towers and of the walls remain, with beside them the remains of the twelfth-century medieval aqueduct that carried water up to it. The fief was so large that it earned the name of State of Arena: in 1536 Charles V raised it to a marquisate, and in 1675, at the death of Andrea Concublet — a man of great culture and a patron — it passed to his little son Riccardo, who died three years later, bringing the house to extinction.

Above the village, between seven and eight hundred metres, runs a system of channels for irrigation water which they call here the Prise: it is a piece of historical and anthropological heritage on which researchers have been working since 2021, within a project of the Comune with the universities of Siena and Basilicata and the Soprintendenza. The Marchesale forest, which belonged to the fief of the marchesa Caracciolo Imperiale, passed to the state forest domain in 1914 and has been a biogenetic nature reserve since 1977: it covers more than fifteen hundred hectares, between seven hundred and fifty and one thousand one hundred and seventy metres, and is crossed by marked paths. In the mother church of Santa Maria de Latinis is kept a reliquary of the Holy Cross, a silver stauroteca of the fifteenth century in the shape of a cross, which held what were believed to be three thorns from Christ's crown and three fragments of the wood of the Cross; on the lower terminal, beneath a cherub, the arms of the Conclubet are engraved. In the church of Maria Santissima delle Grazie there are the frescoes of Carmelo Zimatore and Diego Grillo, a wooden statue of 1801 by Domenico De Lorenzo of Tropea and a bronze bell of 1619.