Soriano grew up around a convent. The Dominicans founded it in 1510, and in the Baroque age it became one of the richest and most famous Dominican houses in Europe and one of the most visited sanctuaries in the south: in the middle of the eighteenth century the British traveller Henry Swinburne noted that about fifteen hundred women believed to be possessed came here on pilgrimage every year. What called them was a picture: on the fifteenth of September 1530 the lay brother Lorenzo da Grotteria is said to have had a vision of the Madonna, who left him an image of Saint Dominic not painted by human hand, the scene Guercino made famous as the Vision of Soriano.
The earthquake of 1783 razed the convent: the shock reached the eleventh degree of the Mercalli scale and its epicentre lay in a vast area between Soriano, Polistena and Borgia. The complex, five cloisters and a church of four bays with six side chapels, was never rebuilt as it had been: the ruins are today the village's chief monument and one of the harshest memories of that earthquake in Calabria. In the underground rooms of the same convent there is now the MuTerr, a museum given over entirely to earthquakes, among the first in Europe.
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📅 Every year, on 11 November (Saint Martin) and 8 August (Saint Dominic)
On 11 November, in the hamlet of the same name, Soriano Calabro celebrates Saint Martin of Tours; the town's other patron, Saint Dominic de Guzmán, is celebrated on 8 August.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Soriano Calabro, but an easy day trip away.
