Altomonte

The town changed its name twice in six years, and none of the three names resembles the others. In a document of 1065 the settlement is called Brahalla, a name of Arab-Saracen derivation; in 1337, by the will of its lord Filippo Sangineto, Brahalla became Altumflumen, that is high river; and in 1343 queen Joanna changed it to Altomonte. How populous it was is told by the Cedula subventionis of 1276, which gives it 1261 inhabitants, more than ancient and noble towns such as Cassano, which had 1136, Oriolo with 1025 and Malvito with 536. The territory, fertile and partly flat, produces oil and wines from native vines: some historians have wanted to identify Altomonte with Balbia, the city of wine cited by Pliny the Elder, but the identification remains uncertain. Of the Normans, who arrived here in the middle of the eleventh century, there remain the first ring of walls, the castle and the tower later called dei Pallotta, one of the major examples of Norman military architecture in Calabria.

The leap was made by Filippo Sangineto, who appears as lord of Brahalla in a Vatican document of 1319 and who made this village one of the chief artistic centres of Angevin Calabria. He opened new quarters, enlarged and fortified the walls, and obtained from pope Clement the Sixth, by a bull of 18 December 1342, leave to build from scratch the church of Santa Maria della Consolazione over the earlier Norman structure: the pope granted him the jus patronatus and the faithful a special indulgence. The church was then filled with works commissioned from artists such as Simone Martini and Bernardo Daddi. His own funeral monument, which Sangineto had commissioned as early as 1337, was completed after his death and set on the apse wall in 1372: art historians trace it to the school of Tino da Camaino or to the hand of the so-called Durazzo Master. When the male line of the Sangineto died out in 1380, the county passed by marriage to the Sanseverino.