Fuscaldo

Fuscaldo is a town of about 7,900 inhabitants in the province of Cosenza, between Guardia Piemontese and Paola, on the southern stretch of the Upper Tyrrhenian Cosentino coast. The old town sits 350 metres above the sea, on a hill squeezed between two streams, and for centuries was the seat of a fief that also included Paola and La Guardia: from 1496 to 1806 it was ruled by the Spinelli marquises. Its fame, though, is made of stone: the stonemasons of Fuscaldo carved the portals of the village, the twelve-column bell tower of the Immacolata and the statues of the churches, and their craft is still the town’s hallmark.

Geography

The original core occupies a hill 350 metres up between the valleys of the Maddalena and Mercaudo streams, on the western slopes of the Coastal Range, the ridge that separates the Tyrrhenian from the Crati valley; to the north runs the Vardaro stream, whose valley has always been a route between the coast and the hinterland. The territory drops to the sea at Marina di Fuscaldo, where the railway and the SS18 state road pass, and spreads into hill hamlets such as Scarcelli, on the road to Paola, Cariglio, Pesco and San Pietro, each with its own church. The name itself tells of the land: for some it comes from the Latin fons calidus, “hot spring”, after the thermal springs of the area; for others from the medieval personal name Foscoaldus.

History

The hill of Fuscaldo, defended by nature, served as a refuge from the time of the Gothic War (535–553) and, under the Lombards, as a lookout over the Vardaro valley, in use as a through route since at least Roman times. The territory was then Byzantine and exposed to Saracen raids. The first lord of whom memory remains is the Norman Robert of Bohon: in 1110 his widow Sica and son Umfredo appear in the documents, and already by the end of the 11th century Robert’s possessions included the tenimentum Paulae, the future Paola, which for centuries would remain a hamlet of Fuscaldo.

After a long line of feudal lords, in 1496 began the dynasty of the Spinelli, marquises of Fuscaldo, who held the fief almost without interruption until the abolition of feudalism in 1806. From their castle the Spinelli governed a wide territory: Paola was one of their hamlets, and La Guardia, today’s Guardia Piemontese, where marquis Salvatore had his summer residence, also fell under their jurisdiction. It was precisely in the castle of Fuscaldo that in May 1559 Salvatore Spinelli had the Waldensian pastor Gian Luigi Pascale locked up, at the start of the affair that two years later would lead to the massacre of the Waldensians of Calabria; and it was the same marquis who described to the king of Naples, in a letter of 1563, the “very good” waters of the fief of Paola. The Spinelli also left the town the building sites of its churches, such as the oratory of San Giovanni Nuovo, begun for a convent of nuns.

Of the Università of Fuscaldo, that is the medieval commune, remains the mother church it founded and maintained at its own expense until 1749: on 5 June 1166 the archbishop of Cosenza Riccardo consecrated its high altar to Saint James the Greater, depositing there the relics of the martyrs Pope Stephen, Viator, Senator and Cassiodorus, as recalled by a plaque set into the wall of the right nave. Fuscaldo is today twinned with Pero, in Lombardy.

What to see

The mother church of San Giacomo Maggiore is the oldest monument in town: documented from 1166, it originally had Gothic forms and housed many privately endowed chapels, some so narrow they had no altar, so that the families simply had their patron saints painted on the walls of the naves. The chapels are adorned with frescoes and paintings by Genesio Gualtieri of Mormanno and Giovan Battista Santoro; the wooden altar and lectern are the 1984 work of master carpenter Francesco Trifilio.

The Church of the Immacolata, on via Chiesa Matrice, is the masterpiece of Fuscaldo’s stonemasons: its bell tower about 35 metres high is marked by twelve fluted tuff columns with Corinthian capitals, three at each corner. The single-nave building was probably raised by the Archconfraternity of the Immacolata in 1633 and radically remade in the early 18th century by the architect Nicolò Ricciullo of Rogliano; the bell tower came later. Inside, Baroque stuccoes, a cycle of Marian canvases by Giacomo Cestaro and, on the high altar, the Immaculate painted in 1748 by Giuseppe Pascaletti of Fiumefreddo.

In the village you also meet the Church of San Giuseppe on via Garibaldi, of the 18th century, built where a cemetery once was and formerly called the Souls in Purgatory, with the canvas of Our Lady of Suffrage again by Pascaletti; and the oratory of San Giovanni Nuovo on via Roma, 18th-century, inhabited by the Augustinians and commissioned by the marquis Spinelli as a convent of nuns, which keeps beside its entrance a fragment of a medieval crusader column. In the hamlets, the Beata Vergine del Soccorso at Pesco, with its plaque of 1860 and the feast of 5 August; San Michele Arcangelo at Cariglio, founded in 1735; Santa Maria della Stella at Scarcelli, on the road to Paola, with three naves, a Madonna della Stella by Genesio Gualtieri and façade statues carved by the town’s stonemasons. At the Marina, the Church of Santa Maria del Rosario, opened in 1907, keeps two works by the painter Antonio Bertè, including a large Last Supper of 1981, and a bas-relief Via Crucis by the Roman sculptor Alberto Ricci (1980).

The stone of Fuscaldo

What sets Fuscaldo apart along the coast is the work of its stonemasons. The same hands that carved the stone portals of the village palaces raised the bell tower of the Immacolata with its twelve fluted tuff columns and Corinthian capitals, and shaped the statues on the façade of Santa Maria della Stella at Scarcelli. It is a family art that crosses the centuries: the Spinelli fief called on local craftsmen for the fountains and churches of Paola too, and even in the 20th century a master carpenter from the town designed the altar of the mother church. Walking through the old town, 350 metres above the sea, means reading this history on the jambs and lintels.

Getting there

Fuscaldo has its own station on the Tyrrhenian railway, at the Marina, where the SS18 Tirrena Inferiore state road also passes; from the sea a road climbs to the village at 350 metres. By car from the A2 “del Mediterraneo” motorway: from the north, exit Rende/Cosenza nord and SS107 to Paola, then SS18 northwards; from the south, exit Falerna and SS18 northwards. The nearest airport is Lamezia Terme.