How Was Cosenza Built

Cosenza's old town is a rare survival, and its survival is precarious.

The hill

The centro storico is built up a steep slope in narrow stepped lanes, with houses of local stone and brick rendered in ochre, often sharing walls and buttressed against each other. The plan is medieval and essentially unaltered, because the city expanded onto the flat ground across the river instead of rebuilding the hill.

The cathedral

Consecrated in 1222 in the presence of Frederick II, after an earlier church was destroyed by earthquake. It is a plain, wide Romanesque-Gothic basilica, stripped in the twentieth century of a baroque refit. Inside is the tomb of Isabella, queen of France, who died here in 1271 — a French Gothic monument, carved by French sculptors, sitting incongruously in Calabria.

The castle

Norman in origin, rebuilt by Frederick II, wrecked by earthquakes and long abandoned before a recent restoration. It sits on the summit above everything.

The bridge

Across the river the modern city has a cable-stayed footbridge by Santiago Calatrava, opened in 2018, with a single inclined pylon over a hundred metres high. It is out of all proportion to its setting, it was expensive and contested, and it is now the thing most photographs of Cosenza contain.

Propped and empty

A large share of the old town is uninhabited, and steel props and scaffolding are a permanent part of the streetscape. Restoration is ongoing and underfunded. It is beautiful and it is visibly struggling, and any honest description has to say both.