In 1605 this small casale gave birth to the painter Francesco Cozza, who went on to help adorn many churches and palaces in Rome and left his mark in a good many other Italian cities; some of his pictures are in the museums of L'Aquila, Naples, Rome, Vienna and Amsterdam. And it seems he was a cousin, on his mother's side, of Tommaso Campanella. Whether the philosopher was born here or at Stilo was disputed with the neighbouring comune in the nineteen-sixties, and a ministerial decree of 1968 established that he was born at Stignano, which at that time belonged to the county of Stilo; near palazzo Lamberti his house is still intact. The village, at any rate, is older: in a Greek diploma of 1121 it appears as a chorion, that is a Byzantine village, and the property of the Mantes family here is attested from the second half of the tenth century. The name may come from the Greek stenòs, the narrow place, or from a Latin Stenianum, the estate of one Stenius. For a long time it was a casale of the demesne of Stilo, and it became a comune of its own only on 4 May 1811, in the French years.
Around 1740 the Lamberti built at Scinà a late-baroque villa of delights: in the garden a scenographic nymphaeum with fountains, an avenue ending in a marble fountain with two dolphins, and on the main front the marble group of Tancred and Clorinda. It did not stay theirs long: in 1752 the creditors seized it, and in 1761 it was bought at an auction in Naples by the marquis Lorenzo Clemente di San Luca, who added two side wings to the original block; then it passed to the marquises Avati of Polistena and in 1830 to Francesco Maria Caristo, whose family owns it still and has given it its name. In 1984 the Italian post office put it on a stamp. The Lamberti also built, between 1710 and 1720, the fortified casino of San Fili, with an octagonal hall and a drawbridge later turned into masonry; close by stands a sixteenth-century viceregal watchtower, now half ruined, which served to spot the raids of the Turkish pirates. And since September 2009 the village has housed migrants in its empty houses, having taken up an appeal that came from Riace.
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📅 Every year, on 24 October
On 24 October Stignano celebrates its patron Saint Raphael the Archangel; the town preserves the Casa di Tommaso Campanella and Villa Caristo, a Roman archaeological site.
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 Stignano, but an easy day trip away.
