Crucoli

Crucoli has 3,243 inhabitants on a hill above the Ionian, with the river Nicà marking its northern boundary. That river has a name with a story attached to it, and the story is wrong: it was long said to come from the Greek nike, victory, because the final battle between Kroton and Sybaris was supposedly fought nearby and won by the Crotoniates. The battle was in fact fought on the Trionto, a good way further north. The Greeks called this stream the Hylia, and until 510 before Christ it marked the line between the territory of Kroton and that of Sybaris.

On the coast, where the hamlet of Torretta now stands, there was a Roman posting station called Paternum, listed in the Itinerarium Antonini between Roscianum and Meto; a settlement grew around it, with villas working vines, cereals and olives. For a long time nobody could say exactly where it had been: scholars placed it at Cirò, at Cariati, at Umbriatico, and only in 1998 was it identified here, at the villa of Piano di Mazza. The name of the modern town is uncertain too: some derive it from the Latin ocriculum, "little mountain", others from crucola, "little cross", the form Curucoli that appears in the first documents after the year one thousand.