Calabritto

The name probably comes from the Latin calabrix, a spiny wild plant nobody has managed to identify. What defines the place, though, is water: Calabritto is the comune of Campania with the most waterfalls — at least fourteen, with twenty-three important drops — and it has the highest in the province of Avellino, the Rivezzuolo, an eighty-metre fall; its springs, partly captured, supply a hundred and fifty-five comuni in the province of Salerno. Above a thousand metres lie plateaux of centuries-old beech woods, broom and pine, and the highest summit of the whole province, the Cervialto.

The first settlement grew at Castruzzo and Piedelmonte, where people took refuge from the Saracen raids coming up the Sele valley; later it was a fief of the Estouteville, a Neapolitan family who had Italianised their name to Tuttavilla, and it took the title of duchy. On the twenty-third of November 1980 the earthquake razed the village, with a hundred dead and three hundred injured, and the rebuilding did not keep its historic layout. That earthquake was also the third great wave of emigration, after the one that followed unification and the one of the nineteen-fifties: there are communities of Calabritto people in Philadelphia, New York, Vancouver, London, Caracas, Munich and Sydney, with their clubs named after the Madonna della Neve, whose sanctuary stands here at nine hundred and forty-five metres. In the rock church of the Madonna del Fiume, a cave already in use before Christianity, women expecting a child come to pray on Easter Monday.