We must recall the most lamentable flooding of the torrential Piazza river (December 10, 1782), which claimed 113 victims in Nicastro alone. In the following year, from February 26 to March 10, another terrible earthquake reduced the towns around the plain to piles of ruins. The King of Naples turned to the Holy See to ask that the income of the religious orders be turned over to the afflicted towns. Pope Pius VI consented that earnings from holy places go for the relief of the public. A Holy Fund was instituted to administer this wealth, and was supposed to collect the resources and treasures of the convent churches and holy places for use on behalf of the population. Instead, the operation ended up by despoiling holy buildings, from which works of art, furniture and vessels of enormous value disappeared, in addition to manuscripts, early printing, parchments, and other documents of incalculable cultural and historical relevance.
The Great Square, Nicastro (1760) State Archives of Catanzaro
The flooding and the earthquake marked a turn-around for the future urban organization of Nicastro. In fact, the emergency conditioned the city’s structure, influencing both population distribution and economic activities. In particular, the borough of Bella was born, which was the most significant urban event of the latter part of the 1700s. In fact, on July 4, 1789, after much sidetracking in an effort to obtain the relevant permits from vicar Pignatelli, a long-term lease was signed for the use of a vast plot of land belonging to one of the chapels in the cathedral, to build a new section of the town for the homeless of Terravecchia and for other citizens of Nicastro.
The Tree of Liberty
The construction plan was drawn up by the engineer Vincenzo Ferrarese, based on the same criteria adopted by other towns that had been destroyed by the earthquake: the square would be in a central position, with the church facing onto it, a principal public road as the main axis, and all the streets at right angles. In 1799, after the proclamation in Naples of the Neapolitan Republic, the republican movement spread to Nicastro, as it had to so many other southern population centers. The “tree of liberty” was raised by the well-known “gentlemen” Antonio Renda, Michele Procida, Cesare, Giacomo and Nicola Costanzo, Gaetano and Giuseppe Mazza, Fortunato Nicotera, Giacinto Malone and Ettore Stella. Bishop Pellegrini, who didn’t hide his republican sympathies, blessed the tree of liberty at a Te Deum. But then, when Cardinal Ruffo organized the March of the Holy Faith to free the Kingdom of Naples from the French (1799), the counter-revolutionary movement immediately spread, even to Nicastro, guided by spokesmen for the middle-class. Even the lower classes adhered to it, so that at the first news that the Cardinal had disembarked, they tore down the “tree of liberty.” The only one who opposed this popular uprising was the bishop. But the royalist masses, having risen up to tear down the republican city government that had been established with the bishop’s blessings, went to the residence of the prelate, wanting him to come out to join their side and to hold a Te Deum for the victory of the King. The bishop refused and locked himself inside the bishopric, but the enraged crowd forced him to come down to the square to celebrate the end of the ephemeral republican experiment
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