Francavilla Angitola

The village takes its name from an exemption: Francavilla means the free town, free of dues and gabelles, a privilege it enjoyed in feudal times after the Norman conquest and lost when the Angevins won at Benevento, in 1266. The rest of the name, and the patron saint too, come from the same man. Tradition has it that the place was founded by people who had fled the Saracen raids on the coast, in the ninth century, in the years of the Byzantine general Nicephorus Phocas; they settled inland as a casale of a fortress that bore his name, Rocca Niceforo, later Rocca Angitola — and they took as their patron San Foca, whose name is the same. The place was already known to al-Idrisi's Book of Roger, in the middle of the twelfth century.

San Foca was a soldier who laid down his arms and became a market gardener, at Sinope, between the first and the second century. Condemned to death for his faith, he is said to have taken in his own executioners, given them food and dug his own grave; he was thrown into a pit of poisonous snakes and came out alive, and then they beheaded him. He is the protector of gardeners, of market gardeners, of sailors and of those bitten by snakes, and his statue here holds in the left hand a silver snake that licks the saint's chin; the faithful used to offer him sweets in the shape of a snake. The village too, seen from above and stretched along its ridge, is said to look like a snake. The earthquake of 1783 destroyed it completely, and when it came to rebuilding the people quarrelled: some wanted to build again on the rubble, others were afraid and preferred to go down to the plain of Ziopà. They stayed. And the women here wore the pacchiana, whose skirt was made of sixteen metres of cloth wound round several times to form a tail — red if the woman was married, brown if she was single, black if she was a widow.