Santa Severina

The town carries the name of a saint who never existed: there is no Severina in either the Greek or the Roman calendar of saints, and the name comes instead from the ancient Siberine, worn down until it looked like a saint's. The settlement stands on a rocky hill commanding the valley of the Neto. Taken by the Arabs in 840 and freed in 880 by Nikephoros Phokas, it remained Byzantine until 1066. In 1228 Frederick the Second had an inquest carried out here to establish who was bound to contribute to repairing the castle: the officer responsible was named Johannes Vulcanus.

Under the Angevins and the Aragonese Santa Severina was a royal town, that is it answered to the king and not to a feudal lord, and it kept that freedom even while its hamlets were being enfeoffed one after another; only in 1506, after a siege, did Andrea Carafa manage to impose himself. The last feudal holders, until 1806, were the Greuther, a family of merchants who had come from Westphalia. In the countryside, at Serre di Altilia, archaeologists have catalogued the remains of more than sixty enormous pithoi of the final Bronze Age: recent analyses say they held wine, and they are the proof that the Oenotrians were already growing vines here.