Reggio Calabria Discovery Guide
Getting around Reggio Calabria the Smart Way
Reggio holds the Riace Bronzes: two Greek warriors cast around 460 BC, pulled out of the sea in 1972, and among the very few large Greek bronzes to survive anywhere. They are the reason to come to Calabria's largest city, and they would be the reason to come to most cities in Italy.
The friction is that Reggio itself is not beautiful. The earthquake of 1908 destroyed it completely, and what replaced it is a low twentieth-century grid.
Give it a day and take the city on its own terms. Walk the lungomare at dusk, which faces Sicily across a three-kilometre strait with Etna behind it, and which D'Annunzio called the most beautiful kilometre in Italy. Then the museum. Then swordfish at Sicily-facing tables, and bergamot, which grows almost nowhere else on earth.
How to Experience Reggio Calabria
The Bronzes, slowly
Go early, before the museum fills, and stay in the room. They are meant to be walked around, and most visitors give them five minutes when they deserve half an hour.
The lungomare at dusk
A kilometre of seafront facing Sicily, with Etna behind it if the air is clear. The whole city is out there from about six.
Look for the mirage
The Fata Morgana is rare and unpredictable, but the conditions that produce it — still, warm, layered air over the strait — are most likely on calm mornings.
Cross to Sicily
Twenty minutes on the ferry to Messina, which is one of the cheapest and most satisfying day trips in Italy.
Eat the swordfish
Taken in the strait, and best in the simplest preparation available.
Scilla
Twenty minutes north: a castle on a rock and the Chianalea fishing quarter, where the houses stand in the water.
Where to Find Authentic Cultural and Historical Character
Reggio is a city that has been knocked down and rebuilt, and that has spent a century being talked about for the wrong reasons.
It is a proper southern city: dense, loud, sociable, organised around the evening passeggiata rather than the working day. The lungomare is genuinely the centre of civic life, and the ritual of walking it is not a performance for anyone.
The city is also the provincial capital of a region defined in national discussion by the 'ndrangheta, which originated here and is a serious ongoing matter of Italian public life. It is not something visitors encounter, and it is not what Reggio is; but it colours how Calabrians are spoken about, and people here are tired of it in a way that surfaces quickly in conversation.
Underneath is a strong sense of Greek descent — in the museum, in the place names, in the surviving Greko villages — and a corresponding irritation at being treated as a periphery by a country whose written history starts later than this city does.
Emigration has emptied the province for a century and continues to.
Travel Profile
- Best Known For The Riace Bronzes, two Greek warriors raised from the sea • A kilometre of seafront facing Sicily and Etna • Bergamot, grown almost nowhere else • Rebuilt from nothing after the 1908 earthquake
- Travel Styles Cultural tourism • History • Archaeology • Food and drink • City breaks
- Travel Environments Coast • Urban neighbourhoods • Mountains
- Getting Around Trains up both the Tyrrhenian and Ionian coasts with direct services to Rome and Naples; ferries to Messina in about twenty minutes, several times an hour, which is the standard way into Sicily; a limited local airport, with Lamezia Terme ninety minutes north carrying the region's real network; the centre is flat and walkable, and a car is only needed for the Aspromonte
Responsible Travel Tips
Reggio has the opposite problem to most Italian destinations: it is not overrun, it is overlooked.
Stay a night rather than day-tripping from a cruise ship or a Sicilian base. The city gets a great deal of foot traffic that spends nothing, and it is one of the poorest provincial capitals in Italy.
Buy bergamot products in Reggio itself rather than at an airport. The fruit is grown on a narrow strip of this coast and almost nowhere else, and the local processors are small.
In the Aspromonte, keep to marked paths, take everything out, and be aware that the fiumare flood suddenly after rain in the hills even when it is dry at the coast.
The Greko villages hold a critically endangered language with a handful of elderly speakers. Visit with respect rather than as a curiosity, and buy something while you are there.
Summer wildfire is a serious risk on the Aspromonte slopes.
When to Visit Reggio Calabria
April to June is the best window: warm, clear, and the air is clean enough to see Etna properly across the strait.
September to November is the other one — still warm, the sea still swimmable into October, and the light at its best on the lungomare.
July and August are hot and humid, and much of the city decamps to the coast. Evenings on the seafront are excellent; middays are not.
Winter is the quiet argument for Reggio: January here is milder than almost anywhere else in Italy, the museum is empty, and the lungomare is still in use.
The Madonna della Consolazione festival in September is the city's own occasion and the busiest week in its calendar.
Travel Cost Levels in Reggio Calabria
What a visitor actually pays in Reggio Calabria
Reggio is among the cheapest cities in Italy, and markedly cheaper than Tropea up the coast, because it has almost no tourism premium. There is no high season to speak of. It is also the obvious cheap base for a day in Sicily: the ferry to Messina takes twenty minutes and costs very little on foot.