[MysticCat]

Originally posted by tallgreekalum
Doesn't Kappa Sig claim to be founded in Bologna back in the 16th cen.?

Wikipedia describes it this way:

Kappa Sigma's traditional founding was in 1400 in the city of Bologna, Italy. Manuel Chrysoloras, a Greek emissary teaching at the University of Bologna, formed with some of his students a society to protect one another against the unscrupulous governor of the city, a former pirate named Baldassarre Cossa. Cossa was infamous for sending robbers to attack and steal from foreigners - in this case, non-city residents. These students bore weapons for protection and devised secret signs, words, and forms to protect their ranks from infiltration. Cossa, after leaving Bologna, later usurped the Papacy as an antipope under the name John XXIII.

Kappa Sigma was founded in America on December 10, 1869 by five students (George Miles Arnold, John Covert Boyd, William Grigsby McCormick, Frank Courtney Nicodemus, and Edmund Law Rogers Jr.) attending the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. The five founders, called "The Five Friends and Brothers," gathered in McCormick's room at 46 East Lawn and laid the foundations for the fraternity. From this first meeting, Kappa Sigma was given a Constitution and an Oath from which are taken the principles and ideals of all Kappa Sigmas. Kappa Sigma was the first "Southern" fraternity to establish a chapter in the North, at Lake Forest College, Illinois.

If my memory serves me correctly, some of the "American founders" spent some time in Europe, where they were said to have come in contact with the Society founded by Chrysoloras.