The cultural association “Calabria Prima Italia”, founded in 1982 by Domenico Lanciano from Badolato (CZ), maintains that our region urgently needs to implement an “identity toponymy” more decisively. This means naming streets, squares, buildings and anything else (even school classrooms) after characters, historical events or symbols (such as the Papasidero ox or the Badolato bull) that have contributed to making Calabria that “phenomenon of world history” highlighted already in 1939 by the American writer Gertrude Slaughter in the book “Calabria la prima Italia” which, published in Italian last November 2023 by Giuseppe Meligrana of Tropea with the translation by Sara Cervadoro, is already in its second edition and is presented in various cities .
Domenico Lanciano asserts that >. All this can be achieved if Calabrian culture, especially through the press and schools, helps public opinion to get at least an idea of how and to what extent the people who inhabited the territory of present-day Calabria since the Neolithic (at least 3500 years ago) was so perceptive that he even invented “ethical democracy” with King Italo, from whom the name Italy derives, one of the oldest and most glorious in the world.
Therefore, every municipality in Calabria should have something named after this Italian King who was the founder of the political “first Italy” already as a “notion” and “nation”… which was fully recognized by the Roman emperors themselves, who extended the name Italy up to the Alps and then to Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica. It goes without saying that if this name Italy (born in Calabria around 1500 BC between the gulfs of Squillace and Lamezia) had not been so important, it certainly would not have had such universal consideration and our Peninsula would perhaps have been called Romania or Augustea or with another name that exalted the power of Rome. Instead, Calabria was the “Mother of Italy” as claimed, in various ways, by ancient and current historians, philosophers and writers.
It is, therefore, a civil, moral and social pedagogical obligation for all Italian institutions (and Calabrian ones in particular) to make known the authenticity of these basic historical facts, also through identity toponymy, naming everything possible after Re Italo, to “Calabria Prima Italia” and to those characters who made this land so important for the civilization of mankind, especially the West. A list of facts and characters is already present in Slaughter’s precious work and in many other past and contemporary writers. Domenico Lanciano hopes that a socio-cultural mobilization will take place around King Italo and the Prima Italia, while thanking Vincenzo Serrao (formerly Director of Demographic Services of the Municipality of Badolato) who, on 28 January 2024, wrote to the mayor Giuseppe Nicola Parretta to urge him to dedicate the now obsolete and improper names of Corso Vittorio Emanuele III and Corso Umberto I of the ancient village to King Italo and Calabria Prima Italia.
