Bisignano

Robert of Hauteville earned his nickname Guiscard, the cunning one, under the walls of Bisignano. In 1056 he called Pietro Turra, the richest lord of the town, to a parley to settle a quarrel between the townspeople and the Normans; while they were talking, in full view of both sides, he seized him round the middle — the man was of enormous build — heaved him onto his shoulder and ran towards his own men. Townspeople and Normans fell to blows, Turra struggled in vain, and he got his freedom back only by paying twenty thousand scudi.

The small chronicle of the town is in the margins of a notary's register. The notary Pietro Paolo Mazzei recorded that on the twelfth of July 1595 the locusts arrived and for days devoured the vegetable gardens, the fields and the oak woods; the people carried in procession first the Blessed Sacrament and then Our Lady of Sorrows, and after eight days, he writes, the locusts were gone. In the same register, on the third of September of that year, the unbroken rain, the landslides, one death, and the Mucone coming down from the Sila carrying trees and animal carcasses with it.