centro storico, collinare, di mezzacosta, spontaneo, San Lorenzo, Laurento (denominazione storica), Laurentum (denominazione storica), Ajo Lavrendi (denominazione in bovese, greco di Calabria), Jeddavrendi (denominazione in bovese, greco di Calabria)

On the upper slopes of a Calabrian hill, San Lorenzo, known historically as Laurentum and, in the local Greek dialect of Bovesia, as Ajo Lavrendi or Jeddavrendi, clings to its hillside with the unforced logic of a spontaneous medieval settlement. It was said to have grown around a Basilian monastery during the tenth-century Arab incursions, when the Byzantine Greek world still held sway here.

The village’s spine runs parallel to the contours, with steep, stepped alleyways cutting across the slope. The houses are low, single-room dwellings packed into narrow, elongated blocks; their walls are a patchwork of rough-hewn schist and brick fragments, roofs of wooden beams and curved tiles. At the top, the parish church of Santa Maria ad Nives faces a broad piazza, where a great elm spreads its canopy across the whole square, a living monument, local legend has it, planted after the Disfida di Barletta. Nothing remains of the castle that once stood behind the church.

Description via source. Coordinates and heritage data from the Atika atlas.