Spilinga

The name of this village comes from a Greek word that no longer exists in Greece. Spìlinga derives from the ancient σπῆλυγξ, which means cave: Aristotle and Theocritus used it, and from there Latin took, even before Cicero, the word spelunca. In Greece, however, that word vanished early, replaced by another, and today it is found in no modern Greek dialect and in no Greek place name. Here, on the other hand, it stayed: not only as the name of this comune, but as the name of dozens of districts scattered all over Calabria, and until the nineteenth century as a living word in the Greek of Bova. The philologist Gerhard Rohlfs, who studied the Calabrian dialects thoroughly, drew from it a conclusion worth reporting: the Greek of Calabria does not descend from the medieval Byzantine koine, but comes down on its own from the ancient Greek of Magna Graecia. The name of a village of a few thousand people, in short, is a piece of evidence in a linguistic argument.

The caves, for that matter, really are here. Around Spilinga several open up, almost all natural, which in medieval times hermits chose as shelter and as a place of prayer; in the grotto of San Leo, in the valley between Spilinga and Carìa, five fragments of sixteenth-century frescoes remain. In another ancient hermit's cave stands the sanctuary of the Madonna delle Fonti: the cult began in the early twentieth century when — so the village tells it — the Madonna appeared in a dream to signora Domenica Muià, inviting her to go to that place, where she found the statue; the little church was built in 1920. Along the Ruffa valley, crossed by its torrent, there are the remains of old mills that worked until the fifties, and a rare tropical fern grows, the Woodwardia radicans; on the road to Vibo Valentia, instead, there is a rural aqueduct of the second half of the nineteenth century, built of stone arches like the Roman ones. Today Spilinga is known above all for something else: it is the home of 'nduja, the sausage made with the poor, fatty parts of the pig and chilli, celebrated every year on the eighth of August.