Cropani

The name is still argued over. A first hypothesis has it from a captain called Croponia, who fled a nearby town because of the plague; a second from the Greek kēros, wax, because in the Middle Ages the district was known for beekeeping and the making of waxes — and in some texts the preacher Arturo Lattanzio, a man of Cropani, is called «the ceroponitan»; but the most plausible is the one that ties it to the Greek kropos, manure, in the sense of rich and fertile earth, which describes this countryside exactly. The origins are lost in myth: it is told that the three daughters of Priam, king of Troy, accompanied in their flight by the captain Antenor, stopped in the gulf of Squillace and founded three cities there on the rivers Crocchio, Simeri and Alli, while Antenor went on to found what would become Padua; the three cities are said to have merged into one, Trischene, that is «three places», and the survivors of the Saracen raids of the later ninth century are said to have climbed into the hills founding Taverna, Simeri, Belcastro and Cropani. Another tradition says that in 831 the ship carrying the relics of saint Mark from Alexandria to Venice took shelter on this coast, and that the captain left the town a relic in gratitude.

The most imposing monument is the collegiate church of Santa Maria Assunta, a notable example of Romanesque architecture, probably built when Cropani was part of the county of Belcastro under the counts of Aquino. Inside is a wooden statue that contains the relics of the blessed Paolo De Ambrosis, born here in 1432, who lived in a convent outside the walls and then withdrew to the hermitage of Santa Maria dello Spirito, where he died in 1489: his relics were moved into the collegiate in 1652. The sixteenth century was terrible: in 1527 the town was sacked by the French, the next year the plague killed 1400 people, in 1562 the Turks burned it, the year after that it was sacked by the men of the brigand Marco Berardi known as king Marcone, and on 13 July 1586 a new Turkish attack left it half destroyed. The reorganisation of general Championnet, in 1799, placed Cropani in the canton of Catanzaro; in 1946 the hamlet of Cropani Marina was joined to it, until then divided between the comuni of Albi and Magisano.