Cotrone

Cotrone is the medieval name of Kroton, the Achaean colony of about 710 BC on the Ionian coast of Calabria that became one of the great cities of Magna Graecia, home of the wrestler Milo and of Pythagoras, who founded his school here around 530 BC. The town kept its Greek hill-and-harbour site beneath a medieval castle, and the name Cotrone took its settled form in the sixteenth century.

In the Middle Ages the marquisate of Crotone passed to the Ruffo of Catanzaro, and in the fifteenth century, through Enrichetta Ruffo, to the Catalan noble Antonio Centelles, one of the leading political figures of the Kingdom of Naples. Charles V granted the town privileges and, in 1541, the viceroy Pedro de Toledo began strengthening its fortifications and castle. In 1799 Cotrone declared for the short-lived Parthenopean Republic when a French ship arrived, but within about a month the Army of the Holy Faith under Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo retook it for King Ferdinand IV.