San Benedetto Ullano

San Benedetto Ullano (Shën Benedhiti in Arbëreshë) sits twenty kilometers from Cosenza, on the inland slope of the Catena Costiera. It is one of the twenty-seven Arbëreshë communes of Calabria, founded by Albanian refugees who arrived between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries fleeing the Ottoman advance, and the language founded then is still spoken at home. The college that trained Greek-Albanian clergy became a centre of Albanian culture in Italy and produced prominent figures of the Arbëreshë intellectual revival before it was moved in 1794 to San Demetrio Corone, taking the town's role as seat of that institution with it.

The village itself stayed a frazione of Montalto Uffugo until 1937, when it became an autonomous commune, a late administrative independence for a place whose religious and linguistic identity had been settled for centuries. The festa of Sant'Antonio in June draws Arbëreshë families back from across Italy. What remains is a village whose civic history is short and whose cultural history is long: a place that outlasted the institution that once made it notable, and kept the rite and the language after the college itself moved on.