Page 10 - SAINT HADRIAN’S CHURCH

Adriano Mazziotti

architectural styles and the messages left at different times,
which make the sacred building a successful commixture
of Byzantine, Norman and Baroque art in Southern Italy.
Throughout its long history, the church has undergone
tamperings, mutilations, renovations, restorations and
even the Saracen ravages, which together with the
earthquakes have hurt and deeply changed its original
architecture, whose traces are very few left nowadays.

The fascinating history of the church and the monastery
begins soon after 955.

Nicola Malena, born in 910 in Rossano, the capital city of
the Byzantine province (Thema) in
Calabria, of a patrician family,
married and father of a baby girl, in
his early thirties convinced himself
to leave behind his family, friends
and the riches and political offices
to wear the monastic habit with the
name of Nilus, taking it from the
holy namesake “Nilus Sinaita”,
who lived between the 4th and 5th
centuries.

After a long period of asceticism, fasting and penance, he
embraced the decision to undertake the coenobitic
experience. So, with a few brothers, he retired in a family
estate in the feet of the hill called "Montesanto" (Holy
Mountain), falling within the territory of “Sancti Dimitri”
(S. Demetrio Corone), where the ruins of an ancient chapel
dedicated to the Saints Hadrian and Natalia still survived,
built by the eastern monks centuries before, and evidence

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