Pentedattilo

Few abandoned villages have a setting as strange as Pentedattilo's. Its houses cling to the foot of a single massive outcrop on Monte Calvario, in the hills behind the southern tip of Calabria, and the rock above them splits into a row of thick stone towers that look uncannily like the fingers of a giant hand raised against the sky. The name says as much: pente and daktylos, "five fingers" in Greek. Beneath them the village is a tangle of roofless stone houses, stairways and lanes, with the church of Saints Peter and Paul still standing among the ruins and the scant remains of a castle on the slope.

The Greek name is not decoration. This corner of Calabria kept a Greek-speaking population for many centuries, and Pentedattilo lost its Greek dialect only in the late nineteenth century. After the Normans took it in the twelfth century it passed through a series of feudal families, and its most notorious night belongs to them. On 16 April 1686, Bernardino Abenavoli, baron of nearby Montebello, whose engagement to Antonietta Alberti had been broken off in favour of another suitor, forced his way into the castle with armed men. The young marquis Lorenzo Alberti was shot and stabbed to death in his bed; Antonietta was carried off and married to the baron, a union later annulled, and she ended her days in a convent. Local tradition turned the rock itself into a witness — the "hand of the Devil", its fingers stained with the Alberti blood — and says the marquis can still be heard crying out from the summit on stormy nights.

The slow emptying came later and had nothing to do with legend. An earthquake in 1783 did heavy damage and people began to drift down to the coast at Melito di Porto Salvo; in 1968 the old village was declared unsafe, and by 1971 the last residents had left for a new settlement lower on the hillside. Since the 1980s volunteers and cultural associations have worked on restoring parts of the old village, and the ruins host a film festival and events of the Paleariza festival of Greek Calabrian culture. Come in late afternoon, when the low light picks out the fingers of rock and the empty houses glow against them.

Getting there

Pentedattilo is a frazione of Melito di Porto Salvo, on the hills just inland from the Ionian coast at the southern tip of Calabria. The nearest city is Reggio Calabria, about 19 km away, and the nearest airport is Reggio Calabria Airport (REG), about 16 km away. The old village is reached by a short road climbing inland from Melito.