Belmonte Calabro

In the locality of Cuoco, where there was a small village and a posting station on the Roman road, a necropolis of about the second century before Christ has come to light. The most striking thing found there is a clay amphora a little over a metre tall, inside which lay the skeleton of a child of eighteen months, buried according to the Punic rite of enkytrismos — a way of burying that reached this far through trade links with Carthage. Those links are confirmed by another find: terracotta vases dug up in 1935 at Serra, which held twenty-three coins struck at Locri, at Crotone and at Carthage. And the rock itself remembers an older water still: the sandstone under the old town is full of shark teeth and sea-urchin spines, which is the way the sea says it was once up here.

The village was founded around 1270, when Drogone di Beaumont, marshal of the kingdom of Naples, built a castle here, and it is probably from his name that Belmonte comes. The fief passed through the Cossa, the Di Tarsia — in whose castle the Petrarchan poet Galeazzo di Tarsia wrote his book of songs — the Ravaschieri, who bought it for twenty-eight thousand two hundred and twenty ducats, the Pinelli and finally the Pignatelli. In 1619 the title of prince of Belmonte was created, and it lasted until the republican constitution abolished noble titles, in 1948. One of those princes, Antonio Pignatelli, struck his own money: a gold coin known as the zecchino of Belmonte. And in 1647, when Masaniello rose in Naples, the prince sent two hundred armed men of Belmonte to the city — to help the viceroy. The town was called simply Belmonte until the unification of Italy: the addition of Calabro is of 1862, confirmed by decree the following year, because there were five other Belmonte in the country.