Sant'Andrea Apostolo dello Ionio

The source keeps two versions of the village's birth apart. Legend has it that around the year one thousand a herdsman from Badolato, named Adriano, brought his flock to pasture here, and that in winter, when the flooding of the river Salubro kept him from getting home, he would stop in a hut he had built himself: the hut became a house, around the house others went up, and out of that came a hamlet. The historical reconstruction tells instead of two migrations. In the eighth century, fleeing the iconoclast persecution, many Basilian monks took refuge in Sicily and then, pressed by the Arabs, crossed into Calabria: a small group settled on the slope between the rivers Alaca and Salubro, where the ruins of a cenobium and of the little church of San Nicola remain. Then, towards the end of the tenth century, came the refugees of a hamlet near the river Assi, plundered by the Saracens and razed by the Normans: that hamlet was called Sant'Andrea Apostolo sull'Assi, and together with the Basilians the fugitives founded another between 981 and 1010, keeping the same name for it and changing only its river into a sea.

In 1156 Malgerio di Altavilla, son of the Norman Ugone, granted the church of San Nicola, its goods and the hamlet to the Carthusians of the charterhouse founded by Saint Bruno; their grange, that is the dependency where the monks who looked after the monastery's property were lodged, became the centre of the village's social life, and the building is today palazzo Scoppa. In 1192, however, the Carthusians were torn by internal discord: the charterhouse had reached three thousand hectares, and the source explains without circumlocution that the economic and political weight it had attained had made the monks lose their own moral values. The pope took the hermitage of Serra San Bruno from them and gave it to the Cistercians with all its granges, and so in 1193 the one at Sant'Andrea changed order too. Long before, in the late empire, a castle called Cocinto had gone up hereabouts to defend against the barbarian invasions: nobody knows where it really stood, and some put it at ancient Cecina, some on the point of Stilo, some right here.