Monterosso Calabro

The name is said to come from the reddish light the hill takes on in the hours before sunset: mons ruber. The village has a long list of disasters, and the list is precise. An earthquake damaged it badly in 1544. In 1620 a frost came so great that, the story goes, a team of twenty oxen crossed the Angitola on the ice. In the summer of 1625 it was a terrible drought that ruined the harvest. The earthquake of 1783 razed every house in Monterosso: the church of the Addolorata came down, and the Camaldolese convent and the Carmelite one — the Carmelite nuns saved themselves by taking refuge in the cloister, which was left unharmed. The village was rebuilt thanks to the duke Pignatelli and to the money of the Cassa Sacra, the extraordinary body the Bourbons set up after the earthquake with the task of requisitioning the property of the Church throughout Calabria Ulteriore and reselling it to private buyers. On the eighth of September 1905 another earthquake brought down a bell tower and two churches, and exactly twenty years later another came.

In the sixteen hundreds silk and linen were worked here, and there was a spinning mill of which little is left: the building today holds the museum of peasant and craft life. In 1939 a company from Pinerolo, in Piedmont, came to work the graphite and bauxite mines: it employed hundreds of local miners, and every morning they went to work on the Frejus bicycles the firm supplied them with. On the thirty-first of October 1948 the company stopped extracting. The old graphite store can still be seen. Today the village lives on pigs, sheep and goats — cured meats and cheeses — and on vines, olives and tomatoes; and a good part of Lake Angitola, a WWF oasis where the osprey passes, falls within this comune.