Rivello

Rivello sits on a ridge above the Noce valley, twenty kilometers inland from Maratea and the Tyrrhenian. The town was disputed between Lombards and Byzantines after the fall of Velia, and its name is read by some as Re-Velia, the place where Velian refugees regrouped. Both peoples settled here and never fully separated: the ridge organized itself into an upper town and a lower town, and for centuries each pole kept its own church, its own clergy, and its own rite, meeting at the market but not at the altar.

The eighteenth century was Rivello's prosperous moment, judging from the parish archives and the stone houses that climb the ridge from that period, including the Baroque work layered onto older Greek-rite foundations in the lower town. The Pollino park boundary runs nearby, and the belvedere at Passo la Colla looks down on the Gulf of Policastro, a reminder that the ridge, for all its inland feel, sits a short distance from the coast it once helped populate. What the town amounts to is a single street holding two histories that ran side by side for the better part of a millennium before finally merging.