Valsinni

Valsinni is here for Isabella Morra. The Lucanian Renaissance poet (1520–1545) lived her entire short life in the Castello Morra above this Sinni-valley borgo — the Morra family controlled the surrounding feud, her father was exiled in France for political reasons, and Isabella was kept under effective house arrest by her brothers, channelling her isolation into 13 Petrarchan sonnets and 3 canzoni that Benedetto Croce later called among the most authentic feminine voices of the Italian sixteenth century. In 1545, when her brothers discovered her correspondence with the Spanish nobleman Diego Sandoval de Castro (almost certainly literary, not romantic), they murdered Sandoval, two of his servants, and then Isabella herself — she was 25.

The case scandalised the Spanish viceroyalty of Naples and her brothers fled to France; her poems survived in a single manuscript and were first published in 1556. Today the Castello Morra (11th-c origin, expanded 14th-c) is the seat of the Parco Letterario Isabella Morra, with the rooms preserved + annotated and the annual Tu, Isabella festival (mid-July) reading her sonnets in those rooms. Valsinni holds the Bandiera Arancione (Touring Club Italiano's small-village quality mark) and sits inside the Parco Nazionale del Pollino — the Pollino's eastern foothills meet the Sinni river here, with Loricato pine forests up-valley to the south and the Maratea coast 60 km east.

The borgo is small but completely intact — stone-paved vicoli, the Chiesa Madre, the Belvedere over the Sinni valley. The food is Lucanian: lagane e ceci, peperoni cruschi, pasta con la mollica, capocollo and salsiccia lucana, the local Aglianico from the Vulture zone 100 km north. Like most small Lucanian comuni, depopulation is real — 3,500 residents in 1951 to 1,344 today.