Gerace Culture

Gerace's culture is that of a small place with a large history and a shrinking population.

Greek and Latin

For centuries this was a Greek-rite town under a Latin crown, and the tension between the two is part of its history. The Byzantine inheritance survives in the dedications of its churches, in some of its saints, and in the Greek-derived place names of the Locride — and, a few valleys south, in the Greko villages where a Greek dialect is still spoken by a handful of elderly people.

The cathedral as an argument

Its size makes a point. A town of this scale did not need a church that big; a diocese covering the whole Locride did. The columns holding up the crypt were carried up from the ruins of Locri, which makes the building a literal continuation of the Greek city.

Ceramics

Gerace has a long pottery tradition, worked in local clay, and a few workshops still operate. It is one of the very small number of things that still produce income in the town.

The town as a set

The intactness that makes Gerace appealing also makes it useful: it has been used repeatedly as a filming location for period work, precisely because there is almost nothing modern in the frame. That is a small income and a slightly uncomfortable one, since it values the town for being empty.

What it eats

Locride cooking: stocco, goat, wild greens, 'nduja and chilli, citrus and bergamot from the plain below, and Greco di Bianco, a sweet wine made a few kilometres down the coast from vines of genuinely ancient descent.