Guardavalle

Guardavalle is the first municipality in the province of Catanzaro. Its beautiful beaches, well equipped for summer tourism, have also deserved special attention from multinational corporations that have invested here in creating one of the most famous resorts in the region. Passing through the countryside and historic olive groves sloping down to the sea, we reach the historic center, deliberately built in a natural basin to blend in during enemy raids. In fact, the constant assaults of the pirates who reached the village from the sea by traveling back along the course of the Fiumara, made it necessary to create a defensive system with an important turreted defense wall that gave the town the evocative appellation of “the town of the twelve towers.” The lower part of Guardavalle constitutes the oldest core of the old town, expanded over the centuries by exploiting the hillside behind it through characteristic concentric ring urbanization. The severe facade of the Church of the Carmine, a 17th-century building that has been remodeled several times, stands out, with its graceful granite portal surmounted by the Sirleto family crest and the imposing bulk of the cusped bell tower. The interior, decorated in Calabrian baroque, houses a fine 18th-century marble altar and, on the wooden pediment, the richly adorned statue of the titular saint. The presbytery space is surmounted by the dome, which still preserves intact the late 17th-century fresco decoration depicting Paradise. The early pictorial altarpiece, now hanging on the choir wall, depicts the Virgin Bruna (or of Carmine) between St. Simon Stock and St. Albert: its execution is certainly seventeenth-century and by an excellent hand, plausibly Neapolitan, as is the canvas opposite, which instead depicts St. Charles Borromeo in prayer. Climbing through the alleyways we rediscover a rather ancient urban fabric, simple but charming social housing that today, however, is in a very serious state of neglect. Through a maze of alleys we reach the square where the Mother Church dedicated to St. Agazio overlooks. The large one-room building was rebuilt several times and finally dedicated in 1584 to the Martyr Saint, Centurion of Cappadocia, when the distinguished relic of the arm was brought here from Squillace by Cardinal Marcello Sirleto. The elegant façade incorporates seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stone parts, while the elevation was reconfigured in the early nineteenth century following the very serious damage suffered in the 1783 earthquake. The interior is decorated with a very simple neoclassical stucco apparatus, and coeval frescoes can be read in the vault, one of which depicts the martyrdom of St. Agazius. The elegant 18th-century high altar, the work of Serbian craftsmen, like the other marble altars in the church, is adorned with a large, finely worked marble Eucharistic display. On the apse wall, a sumptuous eighteenth-century wooden frame of Roglian ambit, donated by the Sirleto family, holds three coeval altarpieces depicting in the center the Virgin in Glory with the Child Jesus between Saints Peter, Agazio and Paul, on the left, St. Michael the Archangel, and on the right a bishop saint (Augustine?). The chapel of the Immaculate Conception, under the patronage of the Spedalieri family, is richly decorated in late 18th-century stucco and houses on the altar the coeval statue of the titular saint; on either side are the tombstones of distinguished family members. The chapel of the Rosary houses in the lavish marble frame of the altar the large altarpiece of the Virgin of the Rosary with the fifteen mysteries, a remarkable work by Bivongi painter Tommaso Martini, who signed it, dating it 1711. In the chapel of St. Agazio, Guardavalle’s patron saint, the precious 19th-century statue of the Martyr Centurion, already attributed by the writer to Raffaele Regio from Serra San Bruno, is preserved within a precious apparatus of stuccoes also from the Serrese area. Among the many noteworthy wooden works we will mention the 16th-century Crucifix, the 18th-century mannequin statue of Our Lady of the Rosary, and a 19th-century San Rocco.
Many ancient palaces occupy the streets of the historic center with their impressive scenic backdrops, as in the case of the 16th-century Salerno palace rebuilt in the 19th century, the Criniti palace, under whose coat of arms the date 1492 is legible, the palace of the noble Sirleto family, in the upper part of the town, an enormous 17th-century construction that was never completed, as was the nearby church of San Carlo Borromeo, a cyclopean building that also remained half-finished and lacking a facade. Wanted by Fabrizio Sirleto, bishop of Squillace, the temple was dedicated to the future saint even before his canonization since Fabrizio’s uncle, the famous cardinal Guglielmo Sirleto, had been his friend and advisor as well as collaborator during the last sessions of the Council of Trent.
Numerous other palaces deserve to be visited, at least externally, walking unhurriedly through the narrow streets of the village to rediscover, among the signs of inexorable abandonment, those wonderful traces of Guardavalle’s artistic civilization. In Immaculate Square overlooks the ancient Spedalieri Palace, whose front adorned by the large granite portal is dated 1777; the inner part of the large quadrangle is older, probably from the late 16th century, and has large rooms used as an oil mill, while the upper part was for residential use for the family. Opposite, on the upstream side stands the Falletti Palace of later foundation, whose exquisite portal with monolithic honeycomb columns supports the large balcony above. The abundant and highly polished use of local granite is owed to the stone masons of Serra San Bruno, the architects of the construction of much of Guardavalle’s urban fabric and its reconstruction after the 1783 earthquake.
On May 7, the town celebrates the feast of the patron saint St. Agazio: for the occasion, thousands of asters’ corollas are collected, patiently strung together to form long, multicolored necklaces. Many of them are brought to the church and made to be worn by the saint; the others are offered during the procession from the balconies and balconies of the houses for the joy and amusement of the more skilled boys who try their hand at throwing them by hitting the saint’s head or, better yet, the spear he holds in his right hand.