Sersale

Sersale is one of the few towns that know the exact day they began: 3 August 1620, when thirteen colonists from Serrastretta received in emphyteusis from baron Francesco Sersale, duke of Belcastro, a part of his fief of Zagarise, and chose to call the settlement after him, after a patrician family of Naples and Sorrento. Within a very few years dozens of families arrived, almost all from the founders' own town and from Scigliano. Before that the area was used in summer by shepherds from the Reventino, and two buildings of the present old centre seem to have existed already in 1538.

The land, however, is far older than the town. At Monacaria stood the Florensian monastery of Santa Maria d'Acquaviva, built in 1194 directly by Joachim of Fiore together with his disciple Peter of Cosenza; very few traces of it remain. In the Italo-Greek monastery of the Three Holy Children, of the ninth century, pope Honorius the Third stayed in 1217, while that of San Nicola was turned into a castle in 1230 by the Falluch counts of Catanzaro on the orders of Frederick the Second. On the hills bordering Zagarise lie the remains of the city of Barbaro, and the place names recalling Charlemagne's paladins all fall within Sersale's territory. The nature reserve of the Valli Cupe holds canyons, waterfalls and ancient trees — the Gigante Buono measures almost nine metres round, the monolith of Pietra Aggiallu stands some eighteen metres high — and the very rare bulb-bearing fern.