Cosenza historical timeline

Cosenza has been the principal inland city of Calabria for well over two thousand years.

Cosentia

It was the capital of the Bruttii, the Italic people of this region, and resisted Rome for a considerable time before being absorbed. Under Rome it sat on the road south and remained a place of consequence.

Alaric

In 410 AD, months after sacking Rome, Alaric the Visigothic king died at Cosenza. The story — told by Jordanes more than a century later — is that the Busento was diverted, a grave dug in the riverbed with his treasure, and the water restored over it, the labourers then killed to keep the location secret.

It is a legend. It has been searched for repeatedly and nothing has ever been found. It is also one of the most durable stories in European historical memory, and the city has lived with it for sixteen centuries.

The Accademia

In 1511 the Accademia Cosentina was founded, among the oldest in Europe. Its central figure was Bernardino Telesio, born here in 1509, whose insistence that nature be explained by observation rather than by Aristotle led Francis Bacon to call him the first of the new men.

Joachim of Fiore

In the hills above Cosenza, the abbot Joachim of Fiore founded a monastery at San Giovanni in Fiore around 1189. His reading of history as three ages, culminating in an age of the Spirit, was enormously influential and enormously contentious; Dante put him in Paradise and the Church later condemned parts of his doctrine. The abbey still stands on the Sila.

Decline and earthquake

Repeated earthquakes, the collapse of the feudal economy and emigration hollowed the city out. The old town has been losing people continuously since the war.