San Gregorio d'Ippona

The village lies on the north-eastern slopes of Monte Poro, and both halves of its name come from somewhere else. San Gregorio is Gregory the Great, honoured in a Benedictine monastery that stood in the place still called Abbadia. Ippona is Hipponion, the name the Greeks gave to today's Vibo Valentia from the second half of the seventh century before Christ — a city that in pre-Hellenic and Bruttian times had been Veip, or Veipone. Between Vibo and San Gregorio stands the sanctuary of Santa Ruba, of which neither the origin nor the date is known: scholars have found traces of a first structure of the Byzantine and Basilian age beneath an architecture that is Baroque.

This was one of the casali of Monteleone, and in 1501 it was sold, along with the others, to Ettore Pignatelli: undoing that sale took three centuries, for freedom came back only with the French law of the second of August 1806, which abolished feudalism. The year after, in 1807, San Gregorio became a comune of its own, and its first mayor was Nicola Bisogni; until 1810 Piscopio was one of its hamlets, and then it became a comune in its turn.