This village in Italy is without name
High on a hill overlooking the valley of the river Sinni, in Southern Italy, sits the tiny town of Colobraro. With its olive groves, painted white houses topped with terracotta roofs, and a population of just 1,500, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is an unassuming place.
But it’s the rumoured victim of a curse, and feared so much by Italians it’s known as ‘the village without name’, or chillu paese – ‘that village’.
Colobraro, an ancient hilltop town in Italy’s southern region of Basilicata, is reputed to be the nation’s unluckiest village.
But why is everybody so frightened of a seemingly innocuous town?
According to legend, back to the 1940s, when Biagio Virgilio, then mayor of Colobraro, proclaimed at a meeting in the nearby city of Matera: “May this chandelier fall down if I’m not telling the truth!”
With those words, the chandelier plummeted from the ceiling, and Virgilio’s village quickly became synonymous with bad omens.
