Morano Calabro

The name has nothing to do with the Moors: the settlement is attested from the second century before Christ, long before the Saracen raids, and the soundest hypothesis is the Latin Muranum, where the estate suffix -anum marks the lands of a family, that of some Murus. Yet the town's coat of arms has borne a Moor's head since at least 1561, and every year the Festa della bandiera re-enacts in costume the battle of Petrafòcu, in which tradition holds that the men of Morano defeated the Saracens. The word Calabro was added instead by a decree of Victor Emmanuel the Second in June 1863, so as not to confuse it with Morano sul Po.

Earlier still, Morano was a stop on the road: in the second century before Christ Muranum was already a station on the consular way from Capua to Regium, the via Annia-Popilia, and it appears on the Lapis Pollae, the milestone recording the distances between Roman cities, at forty-nine thousand paces — seventy-four kilometres — before Cosentia; later it returns as Summuranum in the Antonine Itinerary and on the Tabula Peutingeriana. Its splendour came afterwards, in the medieval and Renaissance centuries, under the lordship of the Sanseverino of Bisignano. Today it is one of the main centres of the Pollino national park: the municipal territory rises from a little over four hundred metres in the valley of the Coscile to the summits, nearly eighteen hundred metres of difference within one comune, and on the highest slopes grows the loricate pine. In the woods live the Apennine wolf and the red kite, and in the cleanest water the otter.