Overview
Located on the slopes of the Serra Dolcedorme of the Pollino Massif, Frascineto is a small Arbëresche municipality 65 km from Cosenza. In the 15th century, a colony of Albanian refugees were welcomed by the Abbot of the Greek Monastery of St. Peter, who assigned them the lands of the Abbey. Worth visiting is the Mother Church of Santa Maria Assunta in Cielo, rebuilt at the end of the 18th century on the remains of a 15th century church that was destroyed.
With the small hamlet of Eianina, the village holds a rich heritage of Albanian customs and traditions. The perpetuation of the Byzantine rite is reinforced by the Arbëresque language that the community speaks fluently. Finely decorated costumes, songs and dances, express the folklore and living pride of a people who, with the "vallje", the dances held on the first Tuesday after Easter, commemorate the victory of the national hero George Castriota Skanderbeg against the Turkish army in 1467.
On the second Sunday after Easter, the "Madonna di Lassù" is celebrated, a devotion linked to the Sanctuary of the Madonna of the Aramei or of the Arms, in Albanian idiom "Shën Mëria Këtje Lartë", located in an impervious area just above the village of Eianina and now in a state of ruins. Of the great splendour of the building, erected in the inaccessible place where the Basilian monks of the Monastery of St Peter used to retire in penance and contemplation, a rock chapel dating back to the 10th-11th centuries remains.
87010 Frascineto CS, Italia
