Ionadi

Ionadi has 3,822 inhabitants on the plateau of Monte Poro, and many write it Jonadi: the name comes from Jonàdes, a Byzantine Greek family name. It is a village with almost no written history — apart from a few pages put together in 1982 by a mayor, there are no public texts that tell it. It is known that it was a hamlet of Mileto, that it followed Mileto's feudal fortunes, and that it became an autonomous comune in 1807 by decree of Joseph Bonaparte.

What is left is the memory of the people. In the church of the Madonna degli Angeli a candle is kept: on the morning of the twenty-third of May 1626 father Giovan Battista De Gennaro was saying mass in distress, because the two small candles he had managed to get hold of would not last to the end of the service, and that one appeared. And in the three confraternities of the village, whoever missed the obligatory processions three times was struck off the list of brothers; whoever had a good excuse — illness, work — had to pay for that absence, and it was called a mancanza.