Carlopoli

Carlopoli is a village that applied in writing to exist. In February of 1625 some men of a family that came from Panettieri and from other old casali of Scigliano presented count Carlo Cicala, master of the fief of Tiriolo, with a formal request: they wanted to found a new casale on those lands, and they would call it, in honour of the count, Carlopoli — the city of Carlo. The count approved, and the feudal foundation was granted for forty-five tomola of grain to be paid every August: the name was part of the deal, the rent was paid in wheat. About five years later, Carlo Cicala obtained the privilege of bearing the title of prince. Through the whole of the sixteen hundreds the economic activity of the village stayed in the hands of very few families — the Montoro and the Guzzo, arrived from Tiriolo, and then the Talarico, the Pingitore, the Brutto and the Nicotera — and from that time the remains of their mansions still stand. Carlopoli became a comune in 1832, under Ferdinand II, and in 1869 a royal decree suppressed the neighbouring comune of Castagna, which was merged into it.

The most important thing in the territory, though, is older than the village and today it is a ruin: the abbey of Santa Maria di Corazzo, in the valley of the river Corace. The Benedictines built it in the eleventh century, and in the following century it passed to the Cistercian reform of Bernard of Clairvaux. The Cistercians, who came out of the Frankish world, turned it into an economic machine: they farmed the land around, raised flocks, set up workshops and made Corazzo self-sufficient. And between 1177 and 1187 the abbot was Joachim of Fiore, in the most intense period of his work as an exegete: it was within the walls of Corazzo that he dictated most of his major works to three scribes. The village, besides, stands at the centre of an ideal triangle whose corners are three places of different origin — Tiriolo, which existed already in protohistoric times, Scigliano, of Roman origin, and Taverna, the ancient Trischene — and for exactly that reason, in the Middle Ages, a great many people passed through here.