[3] Kroton's oikistes (founder) was Myscellus, from the city of Rhypes in Achaea in the northern Peloponnese, after consulting the Delphic Oracle who announced:[4][5] The Achaeans were motivated, like others of the Greek colonisation, by the lack of cultivatable land in their mountainous region and by population pressure.

Archaeology has shown that colonisation in the second half of the 8th century BC had an impact on the settlement organisation and on the economic and social structure of the indigenous communities: in the Kroton area most of the existing settlements disappeared, while grave goods from the Carrara necropolis highlight a widespread practice of mixed marriages between Greeks and indigenous women, since the first generation of settlers.

Many aristocrats were forced to flee to Croton and when Telys asked them to hand over the Sybarite exiles, the Crotonians refused and Sybaris began the war.

[citation needed] As a consequence, Croton became the capital of a confederation including the 25 city-states[18] in the region of Sybaris, as shown by numerous coins minted between 480 and 460 BC.

In 480 BC, Croton sent a ship led by the famous athlete Phayllos and armed at his own expense in support of the Greeks at the Battle of Salamis, the only one from the Italian coast.

This calm lasted until Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, aiming at hegemony in Magna Graecia, captured Croton in 379 BC and held it for twelve years.

When Pyrrhus invaded Italy (280–278, 275 BC), it was still a considerable city, with twelve miles (19 km) of walls, but after the Pyrrhic War, half the town was deserted.

After the Battle of Cannae in the Second Punic War (216 BC), Croton was betrayed to the Brutii by a democratic leader named Aristomachus, who defected to the Roman side.

Little more is heard of it during the Republican and Imperial periods, though the action of one of the more significant surviving fragments of the Satyricon of Petronius is set in Croton, where he mentions the corrupt morals of its inhabitants.

Over a hundred years later, Otto II, Holy Roman Emperor, mounted a campaign in southern Italy to reduce the power of the Byzantines.

Thereafter it shared the fate of the Kingdom of Naples, including the period of Spanish rule of which the 16th-century castle of Charles V, overlooking modern Crotone, serves as a reminder.

Crotone's location between the ports of Taranto and Messina, as well as its proximity to a source of hydroelectric power, favoured industrial development during the period between the two World Wars.

However, after the two main employers, Pertusola Sud and Montedison, collapsed by the late 1980s, Crotone was in economic crisis, with many residents losing their jobs and leaving to find work elsewhere.

Also of notable importance are the sections on the "Vigna Nuova" hill and in the water collector of the industrial area of the Papaniciaro stream, where a large fragment was found with a double facing in opus quadratum and emplecton, dating to the mid-4th century BC.

Numerous houses, both of residential nature and mixed house-artisan workshops, have been excavated, as have furnaces and shops specialising in pottery products, areas of necropolis of Hellenistic date.

To prevent the deterioration of the lower part of the walls due to rain water, stone footings were additionally protected by tiles or pieces of pithoi (large pottery vessels).

Two stenopoi about 5 m wide run across it on an alignment of + 30° E.[28] The discovery of a building in 2010 dating to the Republican age in Via Discesa Fosso indicated the possibility of locating of the Roman colony in the acropolis.

[29] An important domus found in Discesa Fosso includes baths and indicates a Roman-era "neighbourhood" which may have been distinguished from the rest of the Roman town by its secluded position of absolute prestige.

[38] The Cathedral: in 1686, as attested by an existing marble plaque in the current church, on the old oratory a church was built and dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary by a group of lay people who had decided to give birth to a lay congregation in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Souls in Purgatory, which was also called La Congregazione dei Plebei ("The Congregation of the Plebeians").

It has a portal with a single architrave, surmounted by a stained glass window, depicting the Virgin, and two niches with statues, all topped by a triangular gable and side pinnacles.

The extant portion of the Satyricon ends with Eumolpus explaining that the people of Croton must agree to eat his dead body if they wish to claim his inheritance.