Montepaone

The name comes from the Latin Mons Pavonis, the mount of the peacock, and the reason given is a simple one: peacocks were once raised here. Before it was called that the town was called Arunco, and Calabrian historians place it lower down, towards the sea, where the ruins of the monastery of San Nicola remain; the inhabitants later climbed higher to defend themselves from raids. The present name appears in 1094, when count Roger the Norman granted the charterhouse of San Bruno three villages: Arunco, that is Montepaone, Montauro and Olibano, which today is Gasperina. A local tradition holds that Hannibal and the Roman consuls clashed on the plain below, and that the soldiers called the river Grizzo Milites, the soldiers, for how many companions had been left there; when in October 1951 a flood opened a chasm in the river bed and out came an amphora with a skull inside, some thought it was that of the consul Marcellus.

In 1594 the town was put to fire and sword by the Saracens of Sinan Pasha Cicala, and the story goes that they stole the bell of the mother church, but that the ship sank a few hundred metres after leaving the shore. Then came the earthquakes, that of 5 November 1659 and that of February 1783; during a further shock the following March, followed by a tidal wave that lasted all night, Montepaone had neither victims nor damage: it is said the people had made a vow to the Immaculate Virgin, and the eighth of March is still kept as a feast. In 1799, with the Parthenopean Republic, the town was declared a comune and an elm was planted in the square as a tree of liberty. Of those planted then in the other streets no trace remains; the one in the square survived until the two windstorms of 2008, which broke it almost entirely, and it has been cared for thanks also to a fund raised at Rho by emigrants from Montepaone. The peacock and the elm are the emblems of the town.