Pizzoni

Pizzoni lies at the foot of the Serre, on the western slopes of monte Mazzucolo, and two streams run through it: the Cerasia and the Trivio. From the first came the village's old name, which was in fact Cerasia. Of its origin it is told that it was founded around the year one thousand by people fleeing from Pizzo, although some old documents put its foundation in the fourteenth century. For centuries it was not its own master: first a hamlet of Vallelonga, inside the state of Arena, then part of the territory administered by the Dominicans of Soriano — the same friars who in those years were buying and selling whole fiefs in this part of Calabria. It became an autonomous comune in 1811, with the administrative reorganisation of the Kingdom of Naples.

The earthquake of 1783, which levelled half of Calabria, did heavy damage here too, and the village picked itself up stubbornly; from that time comes a legend still told, according to which a landslide about to sweep over the houses stopped through the intercession of the Madonna. The churches are many for a village of this size: San Nicola, rebuilt at the beginning of the twentieth century, San Francesco and the Rosario of the nineteenth, San Basilio, and the church of the Grazie which goes back to the seventeenth. There is also a fountain of the Mermaid. The patron is San Nicola di Bari and is celebrated on the sixth of December, while in autumn there is the chestnut feast. A local tradition holds that Tommaso Campanella passed through these parts at the time of the anti-Spanish conspiracy: there is no proof, but the story has stayed.