Maierato

In February 2010 a whole hillside near Maierato began to slide downwards, and someone filmed it: the amateur pictures of the moving ground went round the world — the BBC broadcast them too — and about two hundred people had to leave their homes. It is the reason the name of this village is known outside Calabria. The land here, for that matter, is of that kind: in the municipal territory stand the ruins of the old Rocca Angitola with its castle, and lower down the artificial lake of the Angitola, which is a WWF oasis. In the village the town hall houses a museum of peasant life, and among the churches there is one that is all that remains of a Dominican convent, dedicated to the Madonna of Providence; another, of the sixteenth century, is Santa Maria della Pietà, while of Santa Maria degli Angeli only ruins are left. Two old fountains are still standing, the fontana vecchia and the one called Scrisi.

Long before the hill moved, however, the people of Maierato had already gone. Many of the men left for the east coast of the United States before the Second World War, and came back after it to marry a woman from the village or to bring their families over; most of them settled in the Pittsburgh area, in Pennsylvania, and went to work in the steel mills. Those who chose Canada gathered in southern Ontario, above all in Toronto and around it. They have stayed close: they have a club, the Maierato Club, and every year they celebrate their own feast of San Rocco, the same one held here. It is a village that rebuilt itself twice, once on hillsides that slide and once in the steel mills.