Sinopoli

The etymology is uncertain, but the name should come from two words of Byzantine Greek and mean the city of the strangers; other hypotheses tie it to Magna Graecia, or to the Norman period and a captain called Sinone. The first explanation, however, agrees well with what is known: the territory was colonised by the Greeks, passed under Rome from the third century before Christ, the local speech began to latinise, and the process broke off when the Byzantines reached Calabria, where they stayed from the sixth to the eleventh century. It is probably in that period that the village was born, from the movement inland of the coastal populations fleeing the Saracen raids. A village of people come from somewhere else, then, at the foot of the Aspromonte, always isolated, and kept going only by the hard work of those who lived there.

Today Sinopoli is the same name written three times at three different heights: Sinopoli Vecchio a little above three hundred metres, Sinopoli Inferiore a little above four hundred, and Sinopoli Superiore at five hundred, which is the municipal seat. The highest of the three exists because of the earthquake of 1783, which badly damaged the lower town: the bulk of the survivors climbed up and founded the new village. Under the Normans, before all this, it had been the capital of a wide county and one of the chief seats of the feudal power of the Ruffo di Calabria. During the Second World War American aircraft bombed the village and destroyed many houses, the church and the hospital, besides killing a good number of its people. On the eighth of September the procession of Maria Santissima delle Grazie goes out with the torchlit olive branches and the traditional dance of the Giants; and all around, the village is ringed by mineral springs, each with a taste of its own.