Cerisano has 3,271 inhabitants at the foot of Monte Cocuzzo, above the Cosenza basin, and it appears for the first time in the Angevin tax registers of the thirteenth century. Two hard facts come out of the feudal centuries. The first belongs to 1528, when a famine killed two thirds of the population. The second concerns the lord of the place: in the sixteenth century the fief passed to Valerio Telesio, brother of the philosopher Bernardino. Valerio had been accused of heresy, a crime paid for with one's life, and had escaped conviction thanks to cardinal Guglielmo Sirleto; he was killed all the same in 1579, inside a church at Castelfranco.
After the Telesio came the Sersale, dukes and then princes of Cerisano, who ran up debts until the royal court ordered their feudal property to be let out; from the middle of the eighteenth century the man who actually administered the village was their notary, Lorenzo Zupo, and the Zupo family went on doing it through the end of that century and much of the next. Far later, between 1940 and 1943, Cerisano was one of the fourteen Calabrian comuni that the Fascist authorities designated to receive Jewish refugees in civil internment: they were freed when the Allied army arrived, in September 1943.
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📅 Every year, on 10 August; the Festival delle Serre in late August
Cerisano celebrates Saint Lawrence on 10 August, in the church dedicated to him. In late August and early September, the Festival delle Serre is held, now in its twenty-seventh edition.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Cerisano, but an easy day trip away.
