Soveria Mannelli

Soveria's most famous battle probably never happened. In 1191, at a place called Ruina, the governors of Nicastro and Taverna are said to have clashed with Federico Lanza, a captain of Henry VI of Swabia; but the source for all of it is Carlo Calà's Historia de' Sueui, printed in Naples in 1660 and built on documents forged by Ferdinando Stocchi of Cosenza. The name is disputed as well: Soveria would stand for the sorb trees, or for the Latin Subareae, the areas below; Mannelli for the manni, the wooden tools with which linen cloth was woven here, or else for a family's surname. The village, in any case, is a double one: higher up San Tommaso, named after an oratory built in the early seventeenth century by don Tommaso Scaglione, canon of Martirano, and lower down, along the old road, Soveria, which has grown into it.

What did happen came two centuries later. On 30 August 1860, here, the Bourbon army of general Ghio broke up: eight days afterwards Garibaldi entered Naples. The comune had been given an administration of its own in 1807, after centuries split between the county of Martirano, the crown town of Scigliano and the barony of Pittarella — which in the eighteenth century two sisters divided between them, San Tommaso to the Micciulli and Pittarella to the Passalacqua. And from here, in 1972, a printshop set out that became a national publishing house: Rosario Rubbettino's Rubbettino, which prints for the Italian Senate, brought Hayek and von Mises into Italian, and plants a tree for every book it publishes.