Campana

In the territory of the comune, inside the Sila park, stand two megaliths. One is carved in the shape of an elephant, five and a half metres high, and is known as the Elephant of Campana; the other, whose upper part is missing, is seven and a half metres high and was perhaps the lower half of a human figure. They are thought to be perhaps of the third century before Christ, and about the elephant the explanations compete: that it represents the straight-tusked elephant that lived in Europe in prehistory, or a war elephant of the army of Pyrrhus, or of Hannibal's. Nothing is settled.

Local tradition identifies Campana with the ancient Kalasarna that Strabo names, in the passage where he also speaks of the Homeric hero Philoctetes — but the source points out two things: that Strabo lists the inland settlements without connecting them to Philoctetes at all, and that here there is no archaeological evidence for the late Bronze Age, the period in which the Homeric saga is set. What there is, is Hellenistic: pottery, bronze tools, a small farm, and a rough clay pot found in 1934 by a man named Costantino, known as Ricchinu, which held seventy-eight coins struck between 350 and 217 before Christ. The name Campana appears for the first time in a diploma of 1269 confirmed by Charles of Anjou to the archbishop of Rossano. And the growth of the village has a very concrete explanation: when the population increased, in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds, the new quarters of Casalicchio and Castello grew up outside the walls because they were more convenient for the country people, who coming home after sunset risked finding the Porta del Ponte already shut.