Suspended between the sea and the mountains, very close to each other, Valsinni, until 1873 was called "Favale" and lies on the right bank of the Sinni river. The village is overlooked by the feudal castle where the young poet Isabella Morra was born and lived, albeit for a very short time. Around the manor, where the voice and the tears of the unfortunate woman still seem to resonate, the alleys of the ancient village wind in concentric and overlapping rows. The houses, separated from each other by the characteristic "gafii", a vaulted covered opening that passes beneath, make this small town look as an evocative tangle of alleys and narrow streets, where the Mother Church dedicated to the Assumption and Palazzo Mauri stand out, with the latter containing an ancient mill inside
In 1520 therefore, Isabella Morra was born here, a poet and woman of great sensitivity. The unfortunate was barbarously murdered by her brothers, lords of Valsinni at the age of twenty-five, for an alleged clandestine relationship with the Spanish poet and baron Diego Sandoval de Castro, lord of the nearby feud of Bollita and husband of Baroness Antonia Caracciolo.
Probably the relationship between Isabella and Diego was only epistolary, between two sensitive souls who had finally found themselves united in a brutal world. This is why Isabella's story is different from many other stories of barbarism linked to an incomprehensible sense of honor. For this reason, the local legend tells that the poet's ghost has never found peace and continues to wander within the walls of that castle where she was stabbed to death. Even today there are many who say they have met her, barefoot and in a long white dress, while sadly admiring from the top of the walls the splendid panorama of the valley already sung in her poems. The death of the young poet was not forgotten by the inhabitants of Valsinni who founded a Literary Park in her honor.
Presumably built on a pre-existing Lombard fortification, in the early 1000s, it is one of the best preserved manors in the region.
Suggestive in architecture and imposing in the fullness of its forms, classic in the flight of battlements and loopholes. Thus Benedetto Croce defined the fortress of Valsinni in "Life of adventures, faith and passion, Isabella Morra and Diego Sandoval de Castro", when he climbed the rugged cliff, looking for traces of the Petrarchist poet. Today a national monument, the Aragonese-looking manor house preserves in its rooms works, documents and writings that testify the existential events of Isabella Morra. Some of the verses - published posthumously - written during the forced captivity, seem to recall her death by the hands of the brothers.
"Turbid Siri, about my proud sore
now that I feel near my bitter end
let my dear father know my pain
if ever from his immature destiny he returns"
Isabella Morra's Literary Park leads into the intimate feeling of the poet born and died in the castle of the romantic village, recovering, and almost materializing, the link between places and poetry. Every summer, in the village of Valsinni those verses echo on the occasion of organized events in order not to forget and revive the short existence of the girl. During "Isabella's Summer" the visitor enters a "sentimental" journey back in time that involves the entire medieval center of the town.
