In Calabria, there is a village that is almost uninhabited. Its name is Pentedattilo, meaning five fingers, because the rock on which it stands resembles the shape of a hand.
Here, at the end of the seventeenth century, a baron, blinded by hatred after being abandoned by the woman who had been promised to him, who fell in love with one of his rivals, massacred her family in their castle.
Since then, a legend has lived on, as if born from the very stones: the wind that blows through Pentedattilo’s rocks still seems to carry their screams, and the mountain, shaped like a gigantic hand, is said to bear the bloodstained marks of the baron’s or his victims’ fingers.
Before the earthquake of 1783, the village was full of life. But in the 1960s, the authorities told its inhabitants something that would later prove false: that the rock was in danger of collapsing. Fear spread faster than truth, and people abandoned the village forever. The rock, however, never moved.
Today, this place has more fingers than people: only three inhabitants live permanently beneath that stone hand once thought to be dangerous.
In local memory, this story endures as the tale of an exaggerated fear: one that drove people away as much as hunger and emigration did.
Seen from below, the village seems to speak to all of us: of the stone, stubborn and immovable, and of humankind, whose crumbling houses yield to time and fear.
Step inside, and you walk through despair and nostalgia: collapsing homes, windows forever open to the wind, walls that once listened to laughter, arguments, and the quiet rhythm of lives now gone.
This story made me think of how often we live by fears that others plant in us.
Some stay in jobs they don’t love because they’ve been told it’s dangerous to change. Some give up on love or dreams because someone once said it’s safer not to try. And some, living with illness, stop making plans because the world keeps reminding them to be careful.
Like the people of Pentedattilo, we leave what is beautiful for fear that it might collapse, when, in truth, it never does.
Fear, born to protect us, ends up trapping us in an invisible cage, taking life away from us little by little.
It’s no coincidence that ghost towns fascinate us. They stir both melancholy and curiosity, because they tell our story.
We see ourselves in those collapsed houses that seem to cry out what could have been, but is no more.
The story of Pentedattilo is a symbol of that truth: a beautiful place abandoned for fear it might fall..yet it never does.
