Magisano

The village was called Vucisano, from the name of the herbs that grew here, the vucissi. Then the plague came, and the few families left scattered: around 1200 some moved from Trinchise to an area further north called Zinnante, others ended up at Casale Vecchio. Only around 1460 did they decide to put themselves together in a single village, and that is what is now called Magisano, set on a hill of the Catanzaro Presila above the valley of the Simeri torrent. It was a hamlet of Taverna and belonged to the Ruffo of Catanzaro, then passed to the royal demesne. The French decree of 1811 made it a hamlet of Albi; on 25 January 1820 it became an autonomous comune again. In 1946, instead, it ceded to Cropani the hamlet of Cropani Marina, and with it lost its piece of sea.

In the hamlet of Vincolise there is a house that has remained a museum of itself: that of Antonino Greco, jurist and Garibaldian. On the ground floor the kitchen still has its dressers and the old furnace on which the food was cooked; above are the rooms with the furniture and the household goods of the time. In the library are kept rare texts of philosophy, pedagogy, science and law, Latin dictionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the first Utet encyclopaedia of 1863 and a sixteenth-century edition of Petrarch. The family chapel, built around 1850 and consecrated with a bull of Pius IX, keeps gold reliquaries, a silver chalice, a crucified Christ of plaster worked on sackcloth and a painting by the Neapolitan Antonio Sarnelli; and then the papier-mâché figures of the crib and a cradle of wood and wicker painted by hand. Also at Vincolise there is a small Waldensian evangelical church; and on 8 September, at San Pietro, the sanctuary of the Madonna of the Light gathers thousands of pilgrims.