Casabona

The name looks obvious and is not: the «good house» has little to do with it. One explanation derives it from the Latin casabundia, «about to fall», describing the precarious state of the buildings after an earthquake; the other, better supported, from the Latin caseus through the Calabrian casu, that is a place where good cheese was made — and the documents help, because until 1508 the place is written Caso Bono. The first record is from 1198, when pope Innocent III confirmed to a certain Nicodemo a set of properties in the territory of Casabona.

An earthquake — the sources disagree whether that of 1638 or that of 1783 — destroyed the old village: only the convent of San Bernardino survived, and around it a nucleus of a hundred hearths grew into «Casabona il nuovo», which in time absorbed even those who had tried to rebuild a life in the older settlement. In the hamlet of Zinga salt diapirs come to the surface, rocks of halite as much as thirty metres high, born of the Messinian salinity crisis. And on the slopes of the Timpone di Montagnapiana the naturalist Giuseppe Tallarico left a botanical garden where he experimented with rare species, among them the rubber tree and araucarias.