Overview

Orange Flag of the Italian Touring Club

A historical centre among the most unspoilt and fascinating in Calabria is undoubtedly that of Morano Calabro, of late medieval structure with houses leaning against each other to form the sides of a hill, in the background the Pollino and two other peaks, in a kind of very atmospheric nativity village.

The town was certainly a Roman statio on the road between Capua and Reggio Calabria, and the town's coat of arms, with the head of a dark-haired man, suggests a Saracen presence between the 10th and 11th centuries, the period to which the first fortress on the hill dates, which later became a real castle in the Middle Ages, whose recently restored scenic ruins remain today.

Walking through the streets, alleys and stairways of the historical centre, you will come across the archpriest's church SS. App. Pietro and Paolo (11th century), with the marble quartet by Pietro Bernini and the wooden furnishings of the Moranese cabinet-making school, the church of San Nicola (15th century), with the suggestive hypogeum, the Museum of the History of Agriculture and Pastoralism (Musap), the church of the Maddalena in the main square of the town of the same name, with the Polyptych by Bartolomeo Vivarini and the Madonna degli Angeli (1505) by Antonello Gagini, and several stately palaces.

In May, every year, the village stops for three days, around the 20th, the feast day of the patron saint of San Bernardino, for the Feast of the Flag, a historical re-enactment of the legendary battle of 1096 that marks the birth of Morano identity, the sense of a common belonging, the pride of belonging to the same community.

Among the local products, we recommend handmade pastas such as cavateddri, rascateddri and lagane, pork sausages, cheeses, including Moretto del Pollino and a curious production of Loricanda, as a rare native species of lavender loricata has been renamed.