Serra St. Bruno owers its origin to the arrival of the Monk Bruno of Colony (Germany), founder of the order of the Carthusian Monks, that devoted his lif to the search of God in silence and in eliness and he received in gift from the Count Ruggiero the Norman one the territories that today are geographically individualized as higland of Serre Calabre, for the costruction of his hermitage, The Chartreuse of St. Stephen of the Wood, first monastery of Italy and second in Europe after tha of Grenoble, in France; its full of mystic beauty. Its not possible to enter the Monastery but a visit to the Museum , and the imposing library give an insight to life inside the monastery. Despite being damages by earthquakes, the façade  of the monastery remains together with the lower part of the Gothic-style cloister. A few hundred  metres separate the monastery from the S. Bruno Lake  and the church of S. Maria del Bosco where the waters of a spring feed a small lake in which a statue of S. Bruno kneels in the icy water. According to tradition the bones of S. Bruno were buried here and a spring gushed out when they were disinterred to be transferred to the church of the Abbey. For centuries the ill have been immersed in these waters in search of a cure, especially those possessed by the devil who come to be exorcised.
The country is formed from the historical centre, called Terravecchia and from Spinetto, newer district of the first one because built after the 1783 earthquake, that had destroyed good part of the historical centre, making it crumbling and therefore denominated “terra vecchia” and some buildings of the monastery, among which the Carthusian conventual church, of which today the sixteenth-century façade remains in only granite to testimony of the greatness that the everything monastery possessed. In the town there are a number of churchs adorned with stone portals and wooden furnishings, the work of local craftsmen including the 18th century Church of S. Biagio and church dell’Addolorata.
The following reconstruction of the country was also due to the presence of artisan that they exploited the resources of which the zone was rich for the creation of works of art that they served for the embellishment of the country and of churches, that preserve numerous testimonies of the glorious artistic past of this beautiful country, and thanks to which Serra St. Bruno an important point of reference is become for the whole Calabria.
Fundamentally they were  three the more important  handcraft activities, the extraction and the workmanship of the granite, the workmanship of the beaten iron, the cut of the wood and the workmanship of the wood. This last hocked about ten families that handed down of father in child the abilities of the choice of the wood and the composition of the “scarazzi” up to the last phase of the realization of the coal.
To distance of centuries, still today, in the woods of Greenhouses, it is possible to individualize the “Scarazzi” smoked, sheaves of stacked firewood and covered with wet straw and earth, that allow the complete dehydration and the full cooking of the wood and that it will bring to the carbonization.
To visit Serra St. Bruno means, without doubt, to welcome the invitation to the discovery of the nature.
All it takes is looking around at ourself to understand as the naturalistic landscape is the point of strenght of this territory that during the centuries, it has known how to preserve the about ten arboreal kind and the hundred plants from the asaults of the wild pollution. The territory of Serra detaches for its degree of harmony: to around 800 meters on the level of the sea, we find the highland where the  extension of  the inhabilited centre is found crossed by the rivers Ancinale and Garusi. Already to this height they detach the White Firs, that are the dominant kind of the Greenhouses and the beech tree that are mixed to the other arboreal kinds as the Chestnut trees while it is not being unusual to also find the laricis and the Poplars.
The brushwood is rich of an endless variety of plants that serves as contour to the different kinds act you introduce for quite a lot months of it a year. Among the sought after delicacy of palate, we remember the Porky ones and the Ovulis but more in demand they are also other kinds that be cooked following the most fanciful recipes.