The name comes from the Greek melìkokkos, the hackberry tree, and legend said that whoever ate its fruit gained the strength of Hercules; the historian Giovan Battista Pacichelli, less fanciful, explained it by the mildness of the climate and the fertility of the land. A hamlet of the barony of San Giorgio Morgeto until 1568, the town had spread out at the end of the seventeenth century when the earthquake of 1783 destroyed it almost entirely, as it did the whole plain of Gioia Tauro. From 1816 it was not even a municipality any more: it was a district of Polistena.
It won its autonomy back thanks to a friendship and in spite of an accident. In 1935 the minister of public works Luigi Razza, who had among his close collaborators an official from here, Domenico Romano, meant to take the Melicucco question straight to Mussolini; but in early August he died in the crash of the aircraft taking him to Eritrea. The town feared that was the end of it. Instead, at the end of October the Duce came out in favour, partly in deference to Razza's wish, and on 14 July 1936 Melicucco became a municipality again, taking pieces of territory from Polistena and from Rosarno. Since then it has grown as no other town in the Reggio area has.
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📅 Every year, on 6 December; 16 August brings the Saint Roch feast with the firework donkey
Melicucco celebrates Bishop Saint Nicholas, its protector, on 6 December, in the mother church named after him. On 16 August, the feast of Saint Roch, the celebration is preceded by the «ciuccio», a papier-mâché donkey rigged with fireworks powder.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Melicucco, but an easy day trip away.
