Zambrone

Old texts tell that on Monte Poro there stood a town called Aramoni, destroyed around 1310; those who escaped came down to the coast, and then, since the coast was worked over by pirates, moved inland again into the hills. There they built three villages and, to remember that they were of one blood, they gave them names beginning with the same letter: Zambrone, Zaccanopoli, Zungri. Other explanations make the name come from a family, the Zambros, or from the promontory the village stands on, or — so wrote Gabriele Barrio in the fifteen hundreds — from a Greek word that would mean noble for wine and oil. On the promontory of Capo Cozzo the university of Naples has excavated a Bronze Age settlement, with a fortification and a ditch of some eighty metres and a port that traded with the Mycenaeans; among the finds is a small ivory figure from Crete, made according to the canons of Minoan art: it is the oldest representation of the human figure so far discovered in Italy, and today it is in the museum at Reggio.

For centuries the people of Zambrone worked land that belonged to the nobles of Tropea, paying them very heavy tributes. They rebelled more than once — in the middle of the sixteen hundreds, then in 1712 and again in 1722 — and each time nothing came of it: the countryside went on handing over its harvests. The comune was born of a decree of Joachim Murat, of the fourth of May 1811, which reorganised the administration of the south and established it; the village has not forgotten. In 2016 the council granted Murat honorary citizenship in memoriam, and on the fourth of May 2019 it unveiled in front of the town hall an equestrian statue of him in corten steel.