Calopezzati

Three explanations are given for the name, and the first is a trade: from the Greek kalòs and piqos, «fine clay jars», and masters of jars they truly were here. The second keeps the kalòs and changes the rest — petsades, the workers of leather. The third, less accredited, comes not from Greek but from the character of the people, who were willing to put themselves in another's place: hence the saying «va calopezzati», get into his rags. The village, in any case, was born around a monastery: that of San Nicola, raised by Greek monks at the foot of the hill, because in those centuries a monastery was the best guarantee of safety and people gathered close to it. The safety did not last long: when the Muslim raids fell upon the Ionian coast the monks fled, and the monastery reopened only under the Normans. In 1285 it was joined to the Patirion of Rossano, and after that nothing more was heard of it.

The castle, on the other hand, is still there. It was a Byzantine stronghold; the Normans made of it a four-square fort with storerooms to hold out a siege, the Angevins reworked it, and under the Swabians it became a real castle, military and seigneurial. Then it changed hands continually: the Sanseverino in 1447, the Abenante, the Spinelli, the Mandatoriccio. None of them really lived there, though: only the Sambiase of Cosenza, who arrived in 1698, chose it as a home and in the eighteenth century gave it a drawbridge and a late-baroque library. Today it belongs to the Giannone of Acri, who at the end of the thirties restored it and saved it from ruin. An administrative curiosity: between 1811 and 1816, Crosia was a hamlet of Calopezzati.