Cardinale

There are three competing explanations for the name of Cardinale: the Latin cardinalis, a boundary line, which fits the village's central position among its neighbours; the fact that wool was carded here; or an unidentified personal name. Much older is what came out of the ground: in the nineteenth century, during works to strengthen an iron bridge, polished Neolithic stone axes were found. Shepherds called them cugni or truoni, thunders, because they believed they had fallen with the storms, and carried them about as talismans against lightning. Some are now in the museum at Crotone.

Water here has given and has taken away. The Ancinale, the ancient Cecinus, rises on Monte Pecoraro and reaches the Ionian sea near Soverato; there are two dams in the territory, and the one at Alaco supplies water to eighty-eight Calabrian municipalities. But on the twenty-first of November 1935 a flood filled the village to a depth of two metres in the lower parts: the electricity poles came down, and people spent the night by candlelight upstairs or standing on the furniture. From that disaster the first nucleus of the hamlet of Novalba was born; a second flood, in 1954, produced the second. A plaque on the three-arched bridge remembers that night.