Traveling along the south coast, the gaze is captivated by a huge limestone monolith, placed as a sentinel of the sandy coast of the enchanting city of Vieste which welcomes those who visit it every year.
Pizzomunno (piece of the world) as the locals call it, a piece of the world about 26 meters high of limestone origin, detached from the rocky wall due to the erosion of the sea and winds.
It is linked to the imaginative legend of an impossible love: The legend tells the love story between a beautiful girl named Cristalda, daughter of a marine deity, with long golden hair, and a young fisherman from Vieste, called Pizzomunno. Every day Pizzomunno, with his boat, went to sea and the sirens, wonderful girls enchanted by his smile, emerged from the waves and sang melodious marine songs in honor of him. These creatures were like prisoners of the young man's gaze and many times they had offered him immortality if he had become their king and lover. But Pizzomunno loved only Cristalda, the offers of the sirens had been in vain. One evening, the sirens, taken by an excess of jealousy, attacked Cristalda and dragged her into the depths of the sea. Pizzomunno chased in vain the desperate voice of her beloved and the next morning, the fishermen found on the beach that white rock that the legend says is the young Pizzomunno petrified by pain. It is said that only every hundred years, on full moon nights, do the sirens allow the unhappy Cristalda to re-emerge, to find her lover and the rock in the middle of the sea resumes its human form in order to relive the their union and their happiness and hug his beloved again. Every night of a full moon it seems that by taking a tour around the stack with your beloved you can hear these verses singing, to live a wonderful story again:
Io ti aspetterò,
Fosse anche per cent’anni aspetterò…
Fosse anche per cent’anni!
U.B.
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