Melissa

Melissa has 3,529 inhabitants in the province of Crotone, the village up in the hills and the hamlet of Torre down on the sea: until 1960 you could not even get down to the coast from the village. A local legend tells of count Francesco Campitelli, who had barely succeeded his brother when he reinstated the ius primae noctis and carried off a bride escorted by ninety men; years later he was killed in the church of San Giacomo by the fiancé of a girl who, without his knowing it, was his own daughter. His subjects had an epigraph put up there.

On 29 October 1949, in the Fragalà district, the peasants of Melissa were occupying the uncultivated lands of the great landowners when the riot police arrived: fifteen people were wounded, and three of them died. Their names were Giovanni Zito, who was nineteen, Angelina Mauro, who was twenty-three, and Francesco Nigro, who was twenty-nine. On the Fragalà land stands the monument that remembers them, the work of Ernesto Treccani.