Drapia

The comune is the sum of villages and farmsteads that for centuries were separate things, and their names still keep the language in which they were first pronounced. Between the eighth and the tenth century, in the full Greek-Byzantine age, the hamlet of Brattirò was called Britario and that of Gasponi Chàspones; to the two are added Carìa and Sant'Angelo. Then the Normans arrived and imposed on the region adherence to the Latin liturgy at the expense of the Greek one, along with the feudal system: the rite changed, the names did not. The built-up area sits on a terrace on the northern slopes of Monte Poro, in a territory almost entirely of hills that ranges between ninety and six hundred metres, and tourism is today its main resource, not least because Tropea and Ricadi are a step away.

The comune's coat of arms is a curious case: it is used regularly although it has never been granted by any formal decree. In the first field, red, there are a sword and a Saracen scimitar crossed, and they are there to recall the struggle sustained against the Saracens; in the second, azure, five golden ears of wheat bound in red; in the third, on a sky field, a green hill. An arms that puts together, in three panels, the war, the bread and the place. Among the things that happen here there is one you would not expect in a village of two thousand: in 2022 Drapia hosted the twenty-fourth national week devoted to the method of the Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire, the man of conscientisation.