San Giorgio Morgeto

Until unification the town was simply San Giorgio. Then, since there were too many San Giorgio in Italy, in 1864 Victor Emmanuel II added Morgeto to it, reaching back for the name of the Morgetes, the people Pliny and Strabo write about, and of their king Morges. The material for the legend was there: above the plain of Gioia Tauro stands a Byzantine castle of the ninth or tenth century, enlarged in the Norman period under Roger I and abandoned in the sixteenth, of which the keep, a cistern, stretches of wall and the bases of the towers survive; and in 1921 Vincenzo De Cristo, at Paolo Orsi's request, found a second Byzantine fortress in the territory, Altanum. The mythical king still walks, too: in a Gothic tale of 1842, La notte Morgezia by Michele Amendolia, a priest meets his ghost near the castle.

In the Dominican convent of San Domenico, in 1583, a boy of fifteen took his vows: Tommaso Campanella. The convent was brought down by the earthquake of 1783. And in September 1943, in the sky above the town, a German and an Anglo-American aircraft fought; the German came down on the comune's land, and the people recovered the pilot's body, which carried nothing that would allow him to be identified. He was buried in the town cemetery as an unknown soldier, and a monument was raised on the hill to show where he lies. Of the barony that from 1324 held Polistena, Cinquefrondi and Galatro, the name is what remains; of the grave without a name, the grave.