Old town of Fuscaldo

The old town of Fuscaldo sits on a hill 350 metres above the sea, squeezed between the valleys of the Maddalena and Mercaudo streams, on the slopes of the Coastal Range: a natural refuge inhabited since the Gothic War, a Lombard lookout over the Vardaro valley and, from 1496 to 1806, the seat of the fief of the Spinelli marquises, who from here also governed Paola and La Guardia. In their castle, in 1559, the Waldensian pastor Gian Luigi Pascale was locked up before being handed to the Inquisition. Along the alleys, the stone portals carved by the town’s stonemasons are Fuscaldo’s signature.

The mother church of San Giacomo Maggiore, founded by the town’s Università and documented from 5 June 1166, the day archbishop Riccardo of Cosenza consecrated its altar, was Gothic in origin and gathers endowed chapels with frescoes and paintings by Genesio Gualtieri of Mormanno and Giovan Battista Santoro; altar and lectern were made in 1984 by the carpenter Francesco Trifilio. On via Garibaldi the 18th-century Church of San Giuseppe, formerly of the Souls in Purgatory and built where a cemetery once stood, keeps the canvas of Our Lady of Suffrage by Giuseppe Pascaletti; on via Roma the oratory of San Giovanni Nuovo, commissioned by the marquis Spinelli for a convent of nuns and inhabited by the Augustinians, preserves beside its entrance a fragment of a medieval crusader column, opposite the private chapel of San Sebastiano. Not far away rises the twelve-column bell tower of the Immacolata.