Rosarno stands on a natural terrace cloaked in olive plantations and vineyards on the left bank of the river Mesima, overlooking the Gioia Tauro plain.

[3] Ownership of Rosarno was greatly contested, due to its strategic importance in giving a hold over of the fertile Mesima valley and was controlled by various feudal lords, including the Ruffo and the Pignatelli families.

[3] In the plain surrounding Rosarno, the tremors caused huge landslides which blocked the course of rivers; the resulting marshes led to a malaria epidemic that killed more people than the earthquake itself.

[5] Much of the work is done by illegal immigrants from Africa and Eastern Europe, who gather every morning in the main street in the hope of being picked for a day job.

In December 2008, a gunman entered a dilapidated factory where over a hundred farm workers were sleeping and shot two of them, seriously injuring a 21-year-old migrant from Côte d'Ivoire.

[8][9] The migrant workers took to the streets peacefully, marching through Rosarno to deliver a request to the prefectoral commissioner at the town hall for more humane treatment.

Some 2,000 immigrants, most of them from Ghana and Burkina Faso, demonstrated in front of the town hall shouting "We are not animals" and carried signs saying "Italians here are racist".

[8][11] After the attacks, the Italian interior minister, Roberto Maroni, a member of the anti-immigrant Northern League party, said the tensions were a result of "too much tolerance towards clandestine immigration".

[12] Father Carmelo Ascone, the parish priest of Rosarno, said the situation of the immigrants reminded him of the circles of hell in Dante's Divine Comedy: "These people live in inhuman and desperate conditions.