How Was Reggio Calabria Built

Reggio is the clearest example in Italy of a city whose form was dictated by an earthquake.

The 1908 plan

After the destruction the city was rebuilt on a regular grid of wide straight streets, with strict height limits and mandated anti-seismic construction — reinforced frames, lightweight upper floors, generous street widths so that collapsing buildings could not block escape or bury each other. It is a rational, deliberately unromantic plan, and it is why Reggio looks nothing like the hill towns inland.

Liberty

The rebuilding coincided with the Italian Liberty period, so the better buildings of the 1910s and 1920s carry Art Nouveau detail: floral ironwork, curved balconies, moulded facades. The best of them are along the lungomare and the Corso, and they are the city's real architectural interest.

What survived

Very little. Sections of the Greek walls along the seafront, fragments of Roman baths with mosaic floors, and parts of the Aragonese castle, which lost its upper works. These are displayed as fragments in a modern city rather than as a historic quarter, because there is no historic quarter left.

The lungomare

The seafront was laid out as part of the reconstruction, with a raised promenade, subtropical planting and the Liberty villas facing the water. It was a deliberate civic gesture by a city that had just lost everything, and it remains the best thing the rebuilding produced.

The museum

The Museo Archeologico occupies a purpose-built rationalist block of the 1930s by Marcello Piacentini, itself a period piece, reworked internally in a long restoration completed in 2016.