Sorianello

The name is a diminutive, and it says everything: until the beginning of the nineteenth century this village formed a single body — a single università, as they said then — with the neighbouring Soriano Calabro, and shared with it history, people and allegiances; the two were the upper and the lower Soriano. The present name, Sorianello, was taken only in the nineteen-twenties. Before that it was a fortified castle under the Culchebret, then a possession of the Carafa of Nocera, and at last it fell among the properties of the monastery of San Domenico di Soriano: in this part of Calabria the Dominicans of Soriano were landowners as much as, and more than, the barons. It became an autonomous comune in the nineteenth century, with Murat's reorganisation. In 1964, then, it ceded the hamlet of Collina degli Angeli to Soriano Calabro itself.

In the San Bruno district is the Valley of the Mills, a park created between the nineties and the early two thousands by the council together with the parish priest: inside are the water mills that ground the grain, put back in working order, a small lake fed by the Cornacchia river, the ruins of the settlements of the Basilian monks and the little church of San Bruno, with beside it a centuries-old olive tree in whose shade, it is said, the saint used to stop on his journeys from Serra San Bruno to Mileto. In the church of Santa Maria del Soccorso there is a baroque high altar in polychrome marbles which comes from the destroyed church of San Domenico in Soriano; in that of San Giovanni Battista, in the upper part of the village, are kept a wooden Christ and a sixteenth-century statue of Jesus. In the palazzo Imeneo-Florenzano, the seat of the town hall, since 1995 there has been the museum of peasant civilisation.