Sant'Onofrio

The village bears a hermit's name, and the hermit's name is a place. Onofrio del Cao had taken the first name in honour of Saint Onuphrius the anchorite, and the second from the Cao, the ravine-like slope the Greeks called Caos; at Cao there is still a fountain with basins where, until a few decades ago, the women came to do their washing. Before him this was a place of Basilian monks, with a monastery.

The rest is told by the calendar. On Easter morning, before the midday mass, they stage the Affruntata, the meeting that announces the resurrection, carrying the saints' statues on their shoulders. The Cross is kept twice, on 3 May and on the last Sunday of September — a cruci i maju and a cruci i settembri. On 8 December they eat the curujicchi, which despite the name are not sweets: flour, boiled and mashed potato, water and salt, fried in olive oil and eaten with cold cuts and red wine. At Christmas the table carries thirteen different dishes, with salt cod and greens never missing. And in the nineteen-eighties, when a heavy snowfall broke a big branch off an olive tree, some saw the face of Christ on the bared trunk: for a while people came on pilgrimage, and a chapel was built on the spot.