Olympic wine and vegan history in Italy's south

Do you remember the calamity of y2k, the problem with dates in the computer's system? Do you remember scratching your head in mathematics class over right angled triangles and the square of its hypotenuse? The ancient sources of both these problems came from southern Italy's region of Calabria.

Aloysius Lilius, creator of our Gregorian calendar, and Pythagoras, discoverer of the infamous π r², both lay claim to a piece of Calabrian soil.

Aloysius came from the town of Ciro on the southern side of the region. Ciro is a small town, nestled back from the Ionian coast, but its reputation is large thanks to a bottle of ancient fine wine. The Ancient Greek athletes used Ciro wine to toast the Gods after the games and in the 1968 modern Olympics, Ciro wine was again offered to athletes to accompany their meals. In fact Ciro may be the oldest known wine still in continuous production today.

Aloysius wasn't able to toast his own success, as he died before the Gregorian calendar was officially stamped by the Church. His brother was the one who offered it to the Pope, but in the end the Gregorian calendar has become the most widely used throughout the world.

Perhaps Calabrian soil has something to do with numbers for it was also in this region, in nearby Kroton, that Greek mathematician and philosopher, Pythagoras, landed. Pythagoras set up in Crotone around 530 B.C., opening a school as well as forming an early type of secret religious sect.

Pythagoras' philosophy was that numbers were the ruler of forms and ideas and the cause of gods and demons and his mathematics of nature had a very moral edge. His followers had to renounce personal possessions and were expected to live ethically, sticking to a predominantly vegetarian diet. Indeed, Pythagorean diet was the common term used before vegetarian was coined in the 19th century.

Today, Crotone's Castle of Charles V has been turned into a town museum and houses the archaeological finds of the ancient city of the Pythagoreans.