Ardore

Ardore was born out of a division of land. After the conquest of Bruttium, in 247 before Christ, the Romans set up farming estates right against the cities of Magna Graecia, both to reward old legionaries with wide plots and to strip prestige from those city-states: this territory, less than three kilometres from the excavations of Locri Epizephyrii, began exactly so, as a praedium rusticum and then as a pagus. The oldest part of the town still says it: it rises on a hill that climbs in three levels and has every mark of the pagus munitus, the Roman fortified village, with two quarters crossed by four parallel streets — the Margio and the Tractaria, whose name comes from tractatoria, the place where justice is administered and business done, and where indeed the feudal court of the Bagliva later sat. The highest level served as a lookout.

Before the Romans there were pre-Hellenic peoples: caves on the hills and along the torrent beds, megalithic boulders, stone axes of neolithic shape picked up on the bank of the Pintammati. The Greeks left their mark above all in the dialect, in the names of people and places and in the Dromo, the ancient road along which the first Roman settlements are lined up. From 1546 Ardore began an independent life again as a small feudal state, and went on so until the French occupation of the kingdom of Naples, in 1806: it produced silk, some two thousand five hundred pounds a year, and then wine and oil, while its craftsmen sold their work as far as Pizzo and Messina. Of the feudal lords, only the Gambacorta really lived here: they fortified the town and built the castle.