Sorianello

Sorianello is one of Calabria’s characteristic crib villages, nestled on a steep hillside. Coming from Vibo Valentia, at night it appears from afar as an enchantment quilted with a thousand twinkling lights decorating the darkness. With Sorianello, the visitor once again encounters places linked to the great historical story of St. Bruno of Cologne and Carthusian monasticism. In fact, according to a local tradition, it was near the present town that the saint would have found welcome refuge and rest under an olive tree during his travels between the hermitage of Santa Maria della Torre (now Santa Maria del Bosco in Serra San Bruno) and the Norman court of Mileto. Through the interest of the Certosa serrese and the local archpriest Don Domenico Cannatelli, a small church dedicated precisely, as well as the entire locality, to St. Bruno was erected in memory of those distant events. This is also the area of the “Valley of the Mills,” which documents an important history of manufacturing settlements and industrious activities with its recovered artifacts offered to visitors. The windmills, oil mill, old aqueduct, and leather processing tanks form a striking example of industrial archaeology, which in Sorianello is combined with an intense spiritual legacy. However, the visit to Sorianello does not end with these places. Still worth seeing are the church of St. John the Baptist (it contains a wooden crucifix attributed to the German sculptor David Müller, who was active, in the 17th century, at the Carthusian Monastery of Serra) and the church of Santa Maria del Soccorso, with an 18th-century high altar of Neapolitan workmanship and a tabernacle of the Sicilian school originally located in the church of San Domenico in Soriano. Finally, in the lower part of the village the visitor will find the church of St. Nicholas, the oldest in the village, from whose layout before the 1783 earthquake there remains a chapel (with a marble altar inside), the remains of the floor and the bell tower, not to mention a later wooden statue of Our Lady of Health (1854) and the small museum that houses a number of paintings of the Neapolitan school.