Nel nome di Penn e di Franklin: la nuova Filadelfia calabrese

Abstract

Telling the story of a small village in Calabria is, to a certain inevitable extent, an exercise at local history, focused on a strictly local, peripheral context. One must start from what happened in Castel Monardo, between February and March of 1783, when this Calabrian village was leveled by the great earthquake that then struck centralsouthern Calabria, the so-called Calabria Ultra. Reconstructed as “Filadelfia” by a prominent local family with ties to Freemasons in Naples and abroad, the new town was modeled on William Penn’s plan for the capital of Pennsylvania, the original Philadelphia, which at the time of the earthquake was home to another great historical figure: Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States of America, a US diplomat and a Freemason with influential “friends” in the Kingdom of Naples. This article provides basic facts and various clues for further investigation into this Masonic connection