Nardodipace
A train of stone running along the ridge of the hill, or a ship stranded in the Allaro Valley that arrived here in ancient times, when the river’s waters were still navigable, with the stern facing the mountain and the bow pointing straight to the east and greeting the rising sun over the Ionian Sea. This is the most common image visitors have of the Old Town of Nardodipace, as soon as they catch a glimpse of it at the end of a winding road that descends from the mountain to the valley, in a series of hairpin bends that follow one another along landscapes of great beauty, in the sudden change of vegetation that, within a few kilometers, sees conifers give way to holm oaks, chestnut trees and finally olive and citrus trees. The town stands on a rocky ridge lapped by the Allaro River on one side and the Aucella stream on the other, with houses facing the main street in quick succession, a narrow gut that runs through the town from top to bottom. It seems like a game of fate that it is precisely these two images-the train and the ship-that the morphology of the village calls to mind that have plotted its fate from the very beginning. What everyone around here still calls “lu Pajisi” is in fact now an abandoned hamlet, inhabited only by a handful of people who have stubbornly chosen to continue living there.
It is perhaps the state of stillness, of suspended life, that makes this place so fascinating. Walking through the streets of the old village, it still seems as if one can hear voices coming from the blue-painted wooden half-doors of the small stone houses. The silence is total, broken only by the murmur of the river and the chirping of birds. Sometimes, on windy days, it almost seems as if one can still hear the clock of the bell tower, of which only the empty lancet window that once housed it remains, chiming its chimes in the valley.
The village, which had more than 1,200 inhabitants in the 1861 census, saw its slow decline following the disastrous flood of 1951, like other towns in Ionian Calabria. Since that fateful event, many citizens, moved to the New Town that arose further upstream, on the plateau of Ciano, others, however, chose to remain there among those old houses, lovingly repairing their wounds rather than moving to that new town, certainly more modern and functional, but at the same time soulless. Nardodipace remained for all “lu Pajisi,” the old village; the new town was continued to be called “Ciano” by all.
However, the flood was only one of the causes of abandonment. In the 1950s the whole of Calabria, especially that of the inland areas, was affected by an intense migratory movement, a sort of frenzy that on the one hand pushed the inhabitants of the ancient hillside villages to move toward the sea (contrary to what happened in Nardodipace where the shift took place in the opposite direction) and on the other led the Calabrians to leave overseas, to Canada, the United States, Australia, and then to Northern Europe and later to the regions of the industrial triangle.
A register of the Confraternity of the Sacred Heart, a glorious institution that ruled the community for more than a century and also dissolved in the apocalypse of the 1950s, shows a list of registered brethren. Most of the names turn up crossed out with a blue pencil. On the side, someone has noted “Emigrant” or more laconically “America.”
As the visitor walks along the main street, he cannot resist the temptation to penetrate into the alleys that open up between the houses: a breathtaking spectacle will appear before him, with the two valleys, that of the Allaro and that of the Aucella, dotted with vegetable gardens carved out on steep terraces and, especially in spring, cloaked in the most luxuriant Mediterranean vegetation.
One cannot leave the ancient village without a visit to the small church that stands in a widening in the middle of the built-up area, in the “campanaro” district.
Crossing the threshold of the building, one is hit by a flood of memories. Everything is clean and neat. The freshly painted walls, the freshly cut flowers on the altar. It is as if time has stood still and that little country church, with its facade pointing toward the sea, is an outpost in the fight against time and oblivion.
Inside are kept a number of wooden statues from the Serrese workshop, including the monumental Sacred Heart of Jesus and the exquisite statue of Our Lady of the Nativity, called here “Our Lady of September 8.”
September 8 itself, the feast day, is the best time to visit the village, which seems to come alive again if only for a day. The old houses are reopened and the extinguished chimneys go back to smoking, scattering into the air the smell of burnt wood that mingles with that of the goat meat sauce simmering slowly in the terracotta pans and with the more acrid smell of the gunpowder from the firecrackers that greet the procession of the Virgin that winds, as it does every year, through the alleys.
Leaving the Old Town, going further upstream along the provincial road that, joining the former state road 110, reaches Serra San Bruno, one arrives in the new town of Nardodipace. It is the highest placed center in the entire Serre Park, at a good 1,100 meters above sea level.
The town came into being in two successive phases, the first being that of the post-flood reconstruction of 1951, the second following the 1972/’73 flood. The original nucleus, that of the 1950s, was designed by the famous architect Saul Greco, although over time the various interventions carried out on the houses by the owners distorted their original forms and harmony.
Greco’s style is fully reflected in the church that stands on a high point in the village. Looking at the interior of the building, one is amazed by the severe style that highlights only the load-bearing structures, according to what was called “engineers’ architecture” in those years.
But what really leaves visitors speechless are the extraordinary majolica tiles by Pietro Cascella that adorn the entire temple. Cascella is among the greatest Italian sculptors of the 20th century, author, together with his brother Andrea and the architect Lafuente, of the famous “monument to the victims of Auschwitz” that stands in the Polish concentration camp.
Nardodipace’s works constitute a rarity indeed: as is well known, the Abruzzese sculptor favored the use of stone and devoted himself to ceramics for a rather short period of time.
Cascella’s works include the Byzantine-style Madonna on the façade; the monumental bas-relief on the altar; the baptismal font, with its forms reminiscent of pre-Columbian art but with great theological significance (one and the same Spirit permeating the multifarious expressions of religiosity); the Way of the Cross; the frontals (the one on the high altar is splendid); the holy water fonts, chandeliers and other decorative elements of the altars.
A true museum of contemporary art, all the more surprising as it is unexpected.
In 2005 from Nardodipace came news that went around the world: two imposing megalithic complexes probably dating back to the Late Stone Age had been discovered in the small town of Serre. “Italy’s stonehenge,” the newspapers headlined.
To tell the truth, the two structures had been known to the locals since time immemorial, and their peculiarity had certainly not gone unnoticed, so much so that they had been called in the local dialect “pietri ‘ncastedrati,” or “the stones piled up.” The most sensational discoveries, it is known, are those that have always been in the public eye, and what makes them possible is precisely a different look. In the case of Nardodipace, it was a local photographer, a devotee of ancient history, who guessed that, perhaps, those structures held an even more compelling story than that of the hen with the golden chicks who unveils the secret of her treasure in a dream to the lucky one chosen, and who was always told to children on long winter evenings in front of the hearth.
The opinions of experts, however, were divided from the beginning. The geologist from the University of Calabria who rushed to investigate that mystery had no doubts about the anthropogenic origin as did some prehistoric scholars; strong perplexities were instead advanced by the archaeologists sent by the superintendency.
Doubts have not been dispelled so far by an excavation campaign or georadar surveys, and an even more sibylline taxonomy has been opted for, calling the two complexes “geosites.”
Whether they were the scene of ancient rites and sacrifices to some unknown deity or whether they were the result of who knows what upheaval in the ground that gave them this peculiar shape, megaliths (we will call them that, in the full etymological meaning of the term) remain places of incredible fascination, immersed in an extraordinary naturalistic setting, undoubtedly deserving to be visited and admired in all their majestic and arcane beauty.
