A short history of Bronte and its territory
With today's eyes let's discover together our past. The times of our long Middle Ages are documented by a historic-cultural heritage of exceptional importance. They tell a story of greatness that our ancestors have built or contributed to build. The improved life conditions favor a tourist movement ever more in expansion. We, to gain tourist expertise, and not for exaggerated local pride, have gone to browse, to ask, sometime to search and imagine. With the aid of the camera, as also with the help of historical memories, we have searched for and looked at those ruins which are or were the splendid quality of a past civilization: ours. We wanted, therefore, immortalize those "ghosts" that survived to negligence and abandonment trying not to make them completely vanish and take them as testimony and not as legend. We went searching for documents which allowed us to rebuild the economy, society and culture of the time. We have carefully look at the spirituality and popular piety trying to gather everywhere those ties that show the similarities between our society and that primitive race that preceded her. In a word, we looked for our roots. With these pages, telling the history of the past, we want to provoke interest towards any sign of old traditions, of authentic values that the present standardization, inevitably threw into oblivion. This exposure, however, concise and often superficial in the description of the events, does not have the pretension of being a treaty of history and neither that of a study on the political, economic and social life of Bronte. We only wish that what we have realized can serve as launching pad towards promoting a better understanding of the cultural, social and economic activities of our small country town. |