Torano Castello

The town stands on a rocky spur at 370 metres, between the valleys of the Finita and Turbolo torrents, on the inner side of the Coastal Chain. The name most probably comes from a Latin personal name, Thorus or Turius, with the suffix -anus added, or else — others say — from the ancient Greek city of Thurii; but the explanation told in the town is a different one: Torano would have been named so to seal the victory over a terrible bull that lived in a cane thicket and terrified the people. There were people here already in the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age, probably without interruption from the eighth century before Christ to the fifth after; the present settlement, however, goes back to the eleventh century, to the years of the Normans.

The feudal history of Torano must be kept apart from that of Sartano, today its most populous hamlet but once a fief of its own at least from the fourteenth century: Filippo Cavalcanti di Giannozzo was invested with it on 31 August 1363, and in the seventeenth century one of his descendants, Francesco Maria Cavalcanti d'Aragona, became duke of the Terra di Torano. The so-called castle is in fact the ducal Palazzo Cavalcanti, and it remained without interruption the seat of the family's main branch until the twentieth century. In 1810, with feudalism abolished, the lands of Sartano passed to the Mayerà; in 1811, under French rule, Sartano lost its autonomy and Torano Castello was declared a comune. Popular tradition holds that saint Francis of Paola was conceived right here. And in 2013 Wes Anderson wrote and directed a short film called Castello Cavalcanti, set in 1955 in an imaginary village bearing the name of the dukes of Torano.