Mandatoriccio

The comune carries the surname of the man who made it: Teodoro Mandatoriccio, duke of Crosia, founded it at the beginning of the seventeenth century as a hamlet within the territory of Pietrapaola. Its growth is documented hearth by hearth: three hearths in 1648, ten in 1669, a hundred and ninety-eight between 1741 and 1743 — that is, from a dozen people to more than a thousand in less than a century. And the new people came from elsewhere: first Albanian immigrants, employed in service, then refugees from the casali of Cosenza — Scigliano, Rogliano, Carpanzano — devastated by Saracen raids and destroyed by earthquake.

The earthquake of 1783 razed the village. Immediately afterwards Giuseppe Maria Galanti, travelling the region on behalf of the Kingdom of Naples, noted two buildings as worth recording: the castle, «with drawbridge and four bastions», and the mother church. Of the castle, square in plan with four round towers, the ruins remain, and they later became the seat of the town hall. Pietrapaola, the village of which Mandatoriccio had been a hamlet, spent the nineteenth and twentieth centuries going in and out of the comune, becoming autonomous for good in 1934.