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Villages in Italy Villages
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- Maatschappij en cultuur
FOR ALL THE ANCIENT Italian hill towns and villages that delight the traveler — the San Gimignanos, Montepulcianos and Fiesoles — there are scores of others (many equally or more beautiful) where few venture and in which very few reside today. According to a 2016 Italian environmental association report, there are nearly 2,500 rural Italian villages that are perilously depopulated, some semi-abandoned and others virtual ghost towns. A primary narrative of Italy in the 20th century has been what followed the collision of poverty, urbanization, mass emigration and natural disaster, a confluence of events that has devastated many towns that had otherwise managed to thrive, or at least get by, for centuries. These towns, most of which are in the historically impoverished south, had already lost tens of millions of inhabitants in the great waves of migration from the late 19th century to the mid 1970s; in the last 25 years, they lost another 15 percent. Now, houses and schools sit empty and fields fallow; shops are unattended.
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Letino
Letino is a comune and small village in the province of Caserta, in Campania, southern Italy.
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Letino
Letino is a comune and small village in the province of Caserta, in Campania, southern Italy.
It was one of the villages liberated by the Italian Libertarian Communist Insurrection of 1877 by Errico Malatesta, Carlo Cafiero, Pietro Cesare Ceccarelli, the Russian Stepniak and 30 other comrades. Another village in the same province, Gallo Matese, was also involved. -
Sutera
Sutera is a comune (municipality) in the Province of Caltanissetta in the Italian region Sicily, located about 70 kilometres (43 mi) southeast of Palermo and about 30 kilometres (19 mi) west of Caltanissetta.
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Sutera
Sutera is a comune (municipality) in the Province of Caltanissetta in the Italian region Sicily, located about 70 kilometres (43 mi) southeast of Palermo and about 30 kilometres (19 mi) west of Caltanissetta. The area is dominated by a large monolithic rock termed "The Mountain of San Paolino". Upon this mountain sits the bones of the patron Saints of the town, San Paolino and San Onofrio. On the Feast of San Onofrio, almost all those in the town walk to the top of the mountain, as a pilgrimage to the saints. Sutera holds the award of "bandiere arancioni"[1] from the touring club Italiano. Sutera is currently the only place in Sicily to hold this accolade, which is awarded to touristic areas of excellence. As of 31 December 2004, it had a population of 1,649 and an area of 35.5 square kilometres (13.7 sq mi).
Since 2014, Sutera has augmented its fast-dwindling population with dozens of asylum seekers. The school has been reborn; the butcher and grocer are happy with the growth in turnover; the birthrate has rocketed. “In the 1970s, Sutera had more than 5,000 inhabitants,” the mayor of the town, Giuseppe Grizzanti, tells the Guardian. “By the 1980s we were 4,000, and 3,000 in the 90s. Every year Sutera lost 300 citizens, due to unemployment. The houses emptied, the shops closed and [we] risked becoming a ghost town.”
Sutera comes from the ancient Greek soter, meaning “salvation”. Tucked into the slopes of a remote mountain, it made an ideal refuge during times of war. Now that ancient purpose is being revived. To Italy’s surging anti-immigrant right, the community represents a 21st-century catastrophe: the displacement of Italians by foreigners. But to local people, it represents an older Sicilian story: of migration and flight from war, and the commercial opportunities those movements bring. -
Bagnoregio
Bagnoregio is a comune (municipality) in the Province of Viterbo in the Italian region of Lazio, located about 90 kilometres (56 mi) northwest of Rome and about 28 kilometres (17 mi) north of Viterbo.
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Bagnoregio
Bagnoregio is a comune (municipality) in the Province of Viterbo in the Italian region of Lazio, located about 90 kilometres (56 mi) northwest of Rome and about 28 kilometres (17 mi) north of Viterbo.
The current main town was in ancient times a suburb of the hill town in the same comune now known as Civita di Bagnoregio. In ancient times this was called Novempagi and Balneum Regium, whence the medieval name of Bagnorea. During the barbarian invasions of Italy, between the sixth and ninth centuries, the city was taken several times by the Ostrogoths and the Lombards. Charlemagne is said to have included it in the Patrimonium Petri, and the Emperor Louis I to have added it to the Papal States in 822.
It is famous as the birthplace (more specifically Civita di Bagnoregio) of the philosopher St. Bonaventure in the early 13th century. Writer Bonaventura Tecchi also hailed from Bagnoregio. The mention in a letter of Pope Gregory the Great of a John newly elected as bishop of Bagnoregio is the earliest extant mention of a bishop of the see of Bagnoregio, but he was doubtlessly not the first bishop. The diocese grew over the centuries, incorporating in 1015 what had been the diocese of Bomarzo. After an earthquake in 1695, the cathedral that had been in Civita di Bagnoregio was replaced by one at Bagnoregio itself. In 1986, the diocese was incorporated into that of Viterbo, by whose bishop it was already administered since the death of the last diocesan bishop of Bagnoregio in 1971. No longer a residential bishopric, Bagnoregio is today listed by the Catholic Church as a titular see.