Amantea

Hello every body!!!

I want you to meet my not big city...

This is Amantea...

When in my mind round Amantea the first thing that I think about is the sea...

We had a beautiful sea, quiet in summer and angry in winter..

The summer until about 10 years ago offered us a beautiful sea... I saw my photos when I was young, me in the water and you can sea all my little person, cause you can't distinguish where the water is... but now the things are quite different, the pollution have changed our see...

In our days we have a particular situation: when the sea is calm it seems to be the ten years ago one, but when it is rough you can see all kind of the human rubbish float gaily on the surface!!!

However I love my sea and the summer, and also for everyone, is the best season to me.

By the sea there is the sea front, it isn't very beautiful but he offered a wonderful place of watching when the sea is rough, or when the sun arises or goes down...

Than Amantea is divided in two part: the new and the old one.

For me the old Amantea is more beautiful than the new part...the pictures speak for themselves...

The new part was built without any respect for the natural structure, on the contrary, for example,  the houses of the old part were built as an extension of the rock on which now they still stay...

Amantea history is very ancient... and I'm not able to made an accurate chronology... the only thing I know surely is that: we never have our freedom...

Since it was born the city was dominated by strangers population (Angioini, Aragonesi, Longobardi....barbarian people, as for: not own to the Roman Empire) and the latest one was the Borboni house, if we don't want to considerate the northern Italian as new conqueror, but it is an other story.

Under the Borboni the inhabitants were left in a way of ignorance and the city based its economy on the fishing (we are sea people)...

When Napoleone in his European conquering war went down on the south of Italy (Naples Kingdom) he crushed with a mentality of silent submission to religion and monarchy.. Napoleone spent many years and soldiers in trying to gave freedom to the country..

And Amantea was one of the last city the opposed the obscure mentality of submission to the ideas of freedom and progress, in a siege that began in the first days of 1807 January to the 6 February of 1807, with a mine that burst at 2 o' clock PM, even if the French soldiers didn't succeeded to break through the city wall only the 7 February.

It's a must to say that the French army imported these ideas with the violence, wanting to apply the same French laws to the Calabria. Amantea, and after no longer time the whole Calabria (and Naples' kingdom) broke down. The French army killed lot of rebels, that in Calabria are called briganti, and who were for the king and God, religion.

Then after Napoleon's death, with the Restoration, things returned by the way they were at first. Ignorance, poority, religion. Till the Italian unity, but also in that period after no realised promises by the gouvernment, the briganti went again on the street with their riefs, and to say no in the only way they known.

Todays Amantea is a quite happy city. With sun, sea, spaghetti and music.

This is Amantea's history in few and not precise words, but for whom want to know something more about my city I can say to you that mr Campora knows very much about our city, cause he wrote much about it, like book, popular music text and much more.

So I pray mr Campora to correct my wrong informations and to add something more about Amantea. 

For seeing Amantea's photos click here

Bye Bye...