centro storico, di pianura, montano, Cinquefrondi

Cinquefrondi, in Calabria, is a borgo whose Baroque present is haunted by a far older geometry. The 17th-century historian Padre Giovanni Fiore da Cropani described it as a pentagonal fortress of five angles, each with a round tower, and a great square keep at its centre, a stronghold that had already begun to crumble from age and insolent time. Today, after the devastating 1783 earthquake and subsequent rebuilding, that pentagonal plan is largely lost to patchwork and abandonment.

Yet beneath the Baroque fabric lies a deeper stratum. In the era of Magna Graecia, the Locrians chose this plain, which partakes more of the mountains than the sea, for a small fortress and a temple to the Muses. Local tradition places that temple just outside the modern town, and holds that the settlement of Musappe grew up beside it, mingling Greek colonists with local shepherds and farmers. Cinquefrondi remains a place where the air is still salubrious, but the stone walls tell a story of successive foundations, each half-erased by the next.

Description via source. Coordinates and heritage data from the Atika atlas.