Civita
A Calabrian jewel among the most beautiful villages in Italy, with evocative mountain landscapes, living arbereshe traditions and the spectacular Raganello Gorges.
Civita
and Its talking houses
Civita, on the Pollino, is a village of Albanian origin, appears among Calabria’s I Borghi più Belli d’Italia (Italy’s Most Beautiful Villages) and is immersed in a landscape of great interest between the Raganello Gorges and the Pollino National Park.
The village preserves one of the most important Arbëreshe communities, with Albanian culture, language and traditions still deeply rooted in the local population. Civita was founded in the second half of the 15th century when an Arbëreshe group from a large migration of Albanians forced to flee their homeland due to the Ottoman invasions, stopped here.
Wandering through the alleyways, one discovers the layout of a traditional gjitonia arbëreshë, i.e. the typical historic centre composed of small houses arranged in a semicircle around a ‘mother house’ and a common square, which is the centre of community life.
Houses here have eyes… but also a nose and a mouth. They are ‘Kodra Houses’ (or ‘talking houses’), in honour of the Albanian artist Ibrahim Kodra. They are anthropomorphic-looking dwellings with façades that recall elements of the human face: a large door on the ground floor, an external chimney and two small windows depicting a mouth, nose and eyes of a face respectively. In Civita, the chimney pots of the houses built between the 17th and 20th centuries are also special and had specific functions other than that of sucking in the smoke from the chimney.
Each chimney pot had a different, sometimes very bizarre shape to represent the social classes of the families. The wealthy could afford to have more exclusive and refined chimney pots built, almost like works of art, while the less well-off had simpler and cheaper chimney pots.
The other curious function of the Civita chimney pots was to keep away evil spirits and bad luck that could enter through the chimney.
Not to be missed is the Arbëresh Ethnic Museum, established in 1989 to preserve and safeguard the culture, customs and traditions of the Albanian community: four rooms dedicated to the origins of this population.
Among the things to see in Civita is the legendary Devil’s Bridge, an ancient 36-metre medieval bridge suspended over the Raganello Gorge.
One of the most evocative places in Civita is shrouded in a dark legend: it is said that the bridge was built by Lucifer himself at the request of a landowner, but the Devil in return asked for the soul of the first person to cross it. So the man cunningly made a sheep cross the bridge first, causing the Devil to go into such a rage that he sank into the abyss. On windy days, the Devil’s howl can apparently still be heard.
