How Was Gerace Built

Gerace is a town assembled out of whatever was already there, which in this case was a Greek city.

Reuse

The cathedral crypt is carried on columns of granite and marble taken from the ruins of Locri on the coast, no two quite alike, with capitals of different dates set on shafts of different heights and packed out to fit. It is the clearest physical statement anywhere in Calabria of one civilisation being built from the remains of another.

The cathedral

Consecrated around 1045 and enlarged afterwards, it is a plain, enormous Norman basilica: three aisles, a raised presbytery over the crypt, almost no ornament, and a nave whose scale is startling after the lanes outside. Earthquakes have forced repairs repeatedly and the exterior has been much altered; the interior is close to original.

The town

Houses are of local sandstone and conglomerate, rendered or bare, packed along contour lanes with arches thrown between them where the street narrows. The plan is defensive and organic, running out to the edges of the rock.

San Francesco

The church of San Francesco d'Assisi carries a thirteenth-century portal in which Gothic pointed work is mixed with Arab-Norman interlace — the kind of hybrid that happened in a region governed in turn by Byzantines, Arabs and Normans.

The gates

Three gates survive of the medieval circuit, and the main approach still passes through one of them. With the walls largely gone, the gates are what makes the shape of the old town legible, and they mark where the defensible ground ended.

What is falling down

A substantial share of the town is empty and some of it is unsafe. That is visible and is part of what Gerace is now.