Valsinni

Valsinni sits above the Sinni river, on the hilltop where the Pollino's eastern foothills come down to meet the water and the Ionian coast lies to the east. The Morra family controlled the surrounding feud, and it was into this isolation that Isabella Morra's father was exiled to France for political reasons, leaving her under the effective house arrest of her brothers in the castle above the borgo. She channelled that isolation into 13 Petrarchan sonnets and 3 canzoni that Benedetto Croce later ranked among the truest women's voices of the Italian sixteenth century.

Her correspondence with the Spanish nobleman Diego Sandoval de Castro, almost certainly literary rather than romantic, ended in 1545 when her brothers murdered Sandoval, two of his servants, and Isabella herself. She was 25. The case scandalised the Spanish viceroyalty of Naples and sent her brothers fleeing to France; her poems survived in a single manuscript and were first published in 1556.

The borgo itself is small but completely intact, its stone-paved lanes, the Chiesa Madre and the Belvedere gathered on the hilltop with the fortress above them, now the seat of the literary park that carries her name and hosts the annual reading of her sonnets in the rooms where she wrote them. Depopulation here is real, as in most small Lucanian comuni: 3,500 residents in 1951 against 1,309 today. What remains is a place whose entire identity was fixed in a few violent years in the sixteenth century, and whose present-day recognition, a national park on its doorstep and a quality mark on its streets, sits around that fact rather than beside it.

From Bari (BRI), about 2 h 24 min by car.

Lamezia Terme (SUF) is about 3 h 10 min away.

By car from the center of Bari 2 h 18 min, Salerno 2 h 31 min or Lecce 2 h 57 min.

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