Crotone, Italy

The City of Pythagoras

I’ve been wanting to write this newsletter for a while. While recovering from harvest, I finally sat down to recount a bit about the fascinating city of Crotone in Calabria, Italy.

Crotone has an incredibly rich history when it comes to… math and sports. You probably weren’t expecting that, but just hang on…

Before we dive in we have a few announcements:

• WE MADE OPRAH’S FAVORITE THINGS LIST 2023!!! This is our 2nd year on the list : ) The gift set INCLUDES gift wrapping.

• The EXAU Olive Oil Club is Open!

• We now offer a gift set featuring our book, The Olive Oil Enthusiast + two bottles of our EVOO!

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The city of Crotone has a few different names, including:

• The City of Pythagoras

• The home of the athlete

• And our least favorite, One of the ugliest cities in Italy

That last one is the result of some pretty terrible decisions related to infrastructure and city planning over the past 50 years. So it feels like an especially cruel name for a city that was once the epicenter of Greek culture and migration in southern Italy.

Founded in the 8th century B.C., Crotone was the first polis (Greek city) of Magna Grecia.

The Greeks were in search of a new life and commercial opportunities. Thus sailed across the Mediterranean and began colonizing southern Italy. They brought with them their language, customs, and religion and established cities, many of which still exist today.

So what is Magna Grecia? It translates to ‘Greater Greece’ and refers to the coastal areas of the southern regions of Sicily, Calabria, Campania, Basilicata, and Puglia. The Romans gave these areas the name because they were so densely populated by the Greeks.

Crotone, then simply known as Kroton, grew quite quickly, becoming a cultural and political center. In fact, it’s believed the population ballooned to up to 80,000 (!!), which in 500 B.C. was huge.

It eventually became the home of some pretty famous people, including mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras. He’s the one responsible for creating the Pythagorean Theorem and the reason you can find the length of an unknown side of a (right) triangle.