Dasà

The name comes from the Greek dàsos, which means forest: Dasà is the place of trees, on the Tyrrhenian side of the Serre. It was a hamlet of Arena and a fief of the Culchebret, and the built-up village you see today has been raised twice, because two earthquakes brought it down: that of 1783 and that of 1905. Something older, though, has held out, and it goes on working: the mill of donna Bettina, of stone, which still grinds and has a rare peculiarity — two inlets for the water, so the millstone never has to stop. At Bracciara there are centuries-old olive trees, and oil remains, along with trade, the thing that keeps the village's economy standing.

The traditions here are two, and neither of them looks like a postcard. The first is the 'Ncrinata, the affruntata: on the Tuesday after Easter the meeting of the Mother with the risen Christ is staged, with Saint John acting as go-between; in 2017 the comune made it the patronal feast. The second is called the Caress of the Consolation: every 31 May, at the close of the Marian month, the village collects a donation and assigns it to a case of need, chosen each year by vote. In the church of the Consolazione stands the statue that gives all this its name: neither its maker nor its date is known, and tradition tells that it came here on a cart drawn by oxen, carried away from Bracciara after a fire had destroyed the chapel where it stood. The monument to the dead of the first war, the work of Torquato Tamagnini, was paid for in 1929 by the people of Dasà who had emigrated to Stamford, Connecticut.