Patron saint festival In 114 days
Feast of Saint Agatha
📅 Every year, on 5 February
On 5 February Filogaso celebrates its patroness Saint Agatha, after whom the parish church is named.
Some local scholars have proposed a Greek etymology for Filogaso — «amiable land», or «friend of the earth» — but the documents say something else, much simpler: from the sixteen hundreds to the eighteen hundreds, before unification, the village is always written Fil'e' case, that is, a thread of houses. And that is exactly what one sees looking at it from the mountains around: a line of dwellings stretched along the ridge of a hill, apart from the recent additions. It is a rare case in which the source itself takes the noble version apart, observing that it was only a way of dressing up the humble name of one's own village. The village, moreover, has a second name: the eastern quarter is called Panaghia, which in Greek is the name of the Madonna, and for some centuries the place was called Panaghia more often than Filogaso — so much so that the older people still distinguish between panaghioti and filogasoti. Where the church of the Immaculate Madonna stood, brought down by the earthquakes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there is now a square with a statue of the Madonna, and below remain the ruins of the crypt.
Filogaso stands on an ancient dune of sea sand, and in the fields it is very common to come across shells and pieces of the old coral reef: a porous rock, which here they call pietra carcina, is riddled with the burrows of thousands of tiny animals, and the inhabitants, taking that lightness for something miraculous, use it to build nativity scenes and to decorate churches and houses. In the nineteen thirties, here, the so-called treasure of Filogaso came to light: gold coins ranging from the fourth century before Christ to the second after, today displayed on the second floor of the museum of Reggio Calabria. Somebody, in those difficult years, had enough gold to need to hide it. In 1445 Filogaso became a terra, that is a comune in its own right, and Sant'Onofrio and Stefanaconi became its hamlets. The surnames too tell of arrivals: Teti and Sergi are Greek names of the Ionian side, Stilo and Nano suggest Albanian families, and Albanian too is the word used here for a street, rughe.
🎉 Festivals and feasts in Filogaso 1
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Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Filogaso
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside Filogaso, but an easy day trip away.
Museo storico militare Brigata Catanzaro 📍 Catanzaro · 7.8 km Catanzaro museum of the Catanzaro Brigade: arms, uniforms and relics from Napoleon to the Second World War. Chiesa di Sant'Omobono 📍 Catanzaro · 9.0 km Catanzaro church with Norman-Byzantine features, described as the oldest place of worship in the city. Basilica dell'Immacolata Concezione 📍 Catanzaro · 9.3 km Catanzaro basilica built in 1254, dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, patron of the city. Chiesa del Santissimo Rosario 📍 Catanzaro · 9.5 km Fifteenth-century church in Catanzaro, consecrated in 1499, with a Baroque mother-of-pearl altar. Villa Margherita 📍 Catanzaro · 9.7 km Catanzaro's oldest public garden, of 1881, with an archaeological museum, a library and a view over the gulf. Castello normanno-svevo di Nicastro 📍 Lamezia Terme · 16 km Medieval castle on the hill of San Teodoro in Nicastro, with cylindrical towers and a pentagonal keep.