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The town history and heritage
Looking at old
history books, we must admit that there is not much written about Genzano di
Lucania town history. However the myth says that Genzano is very old and it was
named from a legend that tells us that a young guy called Iens (yens) fell in
love and eloped with a young princes called San, they went to live in the caves
in the chasm, which today are below the town of Genzano, and then, they started
to build a small castle, where the old town of Genzano is now, the name is
virtually the two name of the lovers put together Iens-san (yensan, or jenzan)
I am saying this because I know that in strict dialect of the town even today
it is pronounced Yenzan with no G at the beginning and no O at the end. I know
I have said this before, but I want to explain it a bit more to make sense.
(For those people that can read Italian, I am going to paste here a
couple of links that modern writers have written about the history of Genzano
di Lucania: One writer
has these two link, here, Arch. Pietrapertosa - Storia e dintorni - Genzano
di Lucania, this writer has two links and both
are very interesting,
http://ass-gentius.blogspot.it/ , let us hope they work)
Now let us talk
about more recent history that a recent write has discovered in the archive of
Potenza; this writer is Ettore Lorito and you can find his writings, if you
follow the link of (scrittori e poeti, (as shown above)) one of the first times
that Genzano is mentioned in the archives is that of two brothers Secondo and
Donato who were Christian martyr in the year 258 AD, as they were beheaded in
Genzano ordered from council Valeriano, which I guess was a Roman council for
that part of Italy. This seems to be the oldest written record found written
about Genzano history and not much else; so, let us go back to the Greek chasm
story.
Because in this article
we want to describe to you the chasm on the other side of Genzano that we call
the Greek chasm, we have to say that this chasm starts about fifty meter from
the fountain Cavallina, or perhaps I should say that at the beginning of the
Greek chasm is where the fountain Cavallina is, then suddenly the chasm becomes
very deep and a real chasm that is hard to go into it, and nobody goes there,
unless you have to go there and know the way how to get there; anyhow this part
of Genzano is called the Greek chasm, so, by this name it is understood that a
very long time ago there must have been a colony of Greek people living there.
About the Greek
people and whatever happened to them nobody knows today, as there is no trace
of them and there are no records to check with. So, we are forced to assume
that there was a war, or something like that and they were driven out. Or
perhaps they mixed with the rest of the inhabitants of Genzano and nobody
remembers, or perhaps, as time went by lots of other things happened that
changed the shape of the chasm; so, it became impossible for them to live in
the chasm, because of the erosion and other natural factors which slowly
changed the shape of the chasm, and the use of the chasm, there might be other
factors as well, but let us now talk about the more recent history of this
place.
