Cosenza Culture

Cosenza has an unusually intellectual self-image for a southern provincial capital, and some grounds for it.

Telesio and the Academy

The Accademia Cosentina of 1511 is among the oldest learned societies in Europe, and Telesio's work — arguing that the natural world should be explained on its own terms rather than through inherited authority — puts Cosenza in the prehistory of the scientific revolution. The city is not shy about this.

A university city

The University of Calabria, at nearby Rende, is one of the largest campuses in Italy and brings tens of thousands of students into the area. It is the main reason the modern city has the nightlife and the bookshops it does.

Sculpture on the street

The MAB runs the length of Corso Mazzini: bronzes and marbles by De Chirico, Dalí, Manzù, Consagra and others, standing in the open on a pedestrian shopping street. It came from a single collector's donation, and it is an unexpectedly good collection to encounter while buying shoes.

The old town as an argument

What to do with the centro storico is the running civic debate here. There are restoration projects, university departments moved up the hill, and a slow trickle of bars and studios; there is also a great deal of shuttered property and a population that left decades ago. Whether the hill can be repopulated or is simply being preserved as scenery is not a settled question in Cosenza.

What it eats

Mountain food rather than coastal: Sila potatoes, caciocavallo silano, mushrooms, lagane e ceci, cured pork, and the liquorice of the Calabrian coast, which has been produced here since the eighteenth century and is the best in the world by most accounts.