Centola

Legend has it that Centola was founded by a centuria of refugees who escaped the destruction of Molpa, or by exactly a hundred of them: the linguist Carla Marcato, however, holds it much more likely that the name comes from an agrarian unit of measure, and in any case the town is older than the legend requires. Molpa, though, really existed. It stood on the height between the Lambro and the Mingardo, near capo Palinuro, founded by Greek settlers of Ionian stock, and the polis lasted barely thirty years: in 510 before Christ it was mysteriously abandoned, perhaps because of a terrible epidemic. The Romans refounded it for defensive reasons, with lookout stations to spot Carthaginian ships, and in 547 the Byzantine general Belisarius destroyed it during the Gothic war. The survivors scattered into the monasteries round about and helped to found villages that still exist.

Centola grew around the abbey of Santa Maria degli Angeli, of which absolutely nothing remains today: born as a hermitage of Basilian monks between 515 and 530, it became an abbey in 750, and since the rule of Saint Basil joins work to prayer those monks set up schools, orphanages, hospices, a mill, an olive press, a credit fund, wide olive groves and a library rich in manuscripts: for centuries they were the whole social infrastructure of the valley. Against the Turkish and Saracen pirates, between 1550 and 1600, seven towers were raised along this coast, and they are all still there. In the Palinuro headland, finally, thirty-two caves have been counted, above and below water: the most famous is the Grotta Azzurra, which biologists have studied since the nineteen eighties as a laboratory in miniature.