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Pollara
The other hamlet of Malfi is Pollara, now famous in the world for Massimo Troisi's film "Il Postino". This place looks as if it had come into being preciscly for Troisi in his last years, when he was tired, and desirous of quiet and rest but still had a flame of life in the heart that was abandoning him and an irresistible joyous hilarity that never abandoned his Neapolitan soul. Pollara is like that, calm and silent but at the same time alive and magnetic. It too is a gigantic amphitheatre, where perhaps an eruption was last staged. Indeed, the village is inside a "half volcano", the other half having sunk into the sea. In this small place from the nature point of view there is everything: an immense stone arch (the "Perciato"), a rock stack where there lives a lizard that is unique in the world, breathtakingly high cliffs, caves hewm out in the rock by nature, seabeds that seem to belong to a dream world, and, far out a submarine volcano that has been inoffensive for thousands and thousands of years. Probably Pollara was settled by people from Calabria in the seventeenth century, who brought the cult of Santo Onofrio and built the church dedicated to him in the last decades of the same century, it must be added that on the first Sunday in June the Caper Festival is held, with oenological and gastronomic tasting that every year draws hundreds of visitors. You go to Potlara via a junction, called Barbanacola; one road leads to Pollara, while the other leads to one of the two hamlets of Leni, Val di Chiesa.
