Tiriolo

Tiriolo has 3,897 inhabitants on the isthmus of Catanzaro, and it stands exactly on the watershed: on one side the water goes down into the Amato and ends up in the Tyrrhenian, on the other into the Corace and ends up in the Ionian. From the rock you can see both seas, the Aeolian islands with Stromboli smoking on one side and the Ionian beaches on the other. The name, they say, comes from the three mountains that surround it; and on this isthmus, during the revolt of Spartacus, Crassus's legions and the rebels faced each other from two opposite spurs.

In 1640 a bronze tablet turned up here with the decree of the senate of 186 before Christ engraved on it, banning the Bacchanalia throughout Italy: it is the surviving copy of one of the most famous documents of Roman law, and it has left Tiriolo — today it is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Not far off, on the border with Settingiano, are the ruins of Rocca Falluca, a village born around a Norman castle and abandoned at the end of the sixteenth century: the humanist Agazio Guidacerio came from there.