Rende

Rende used to be called Arintha, and an inscription in the castle's atrium still says so: Urbs celebris, quondam sedes regalis, Arintha. The town was born of a flight: around 520 BC some inhabitants of Acheruntia, which stood in an indefensible spot, moved to a height and called the new settlement Aruntia, «the houses of the strong». Hecataeus of Miletus already cites it as a city of Bruttium. Then the flight happened again, and this is the finest part of the story: when in 914 the emir of Squillace destroyed what was left of Arintha, the people took refuge in Cosenza, and when Cosenza burned too they went up into the Sila and made hamlets. The people of Arintha stopped where Castiglione Cosentino is today, and gave the name Arente to the stream that ran past. That stream is still called so, and still carries water to a town.

They came home with the Normans, and refounded the town on a lonely hill between the Surdo and the Emoli: since then it is called Rende, after the family that took its lordship. People have passed through: in 72 BC, when Spartacus came up the Crati valley, many slaves from here followed him; in 1422 Francesco Sforza, commanding the Angevin army in Calabria and later duke of Milan, shut himself inside Rende's walls and was besieged there; and in the fifteen hundreds the men of Rende embarked at Naples with Charles V for the battle of Tunis. The castle belongs to the town, and was its town hall until a few years ago. Today Rende is a city on two levels: on the hill the old borough of alleys and noble houses, with the view running down the Crati valley; on the flat the university city grown around the Unical, founded in 1972 at Arcavacata as the first residential campus in Italy — bridges, cubes and thirty thousand students who keep the whole Cosenza area young.