Tropea historical timeline

Tropea has been continuously occupied for a very long time and spent most of it as a modest but self-important little town.

Origins

Local tradition credits Hercules with founding the place, which is the standard claim for a Tyrrhenian port and means nothing. There was a Roman settlement here, and by the Byzantine period Tropea was a fortified coastal centre of some importance.

The bishopric

Under the Normans, Tropea became and long remained a bishopric, which for a town of this size mattered enormously: it brought a cathedral, a clergy, and a reason for the local landowning families to build in town rather than on their estates. The palaces along the Corso are the result, and their carved doorways are the best thing in the streetscape.

Raids and earthquakes

The cliff was a defence against corsair raiding, which shaped this whole coast into the eighteenth century. Earthquakes did more damage than raiders: the shocks of 1783, 1905 and 1908 all struck Calabria hard, and much of what stands has been rebuilt at least once.

1943

Two bombs were dropped on the town during the war and neither exploded. They are kept in the cathedral, beside the Madonna the town credits with the outcome.

Tourism

Until the 1990s Tropea was a poor town on a poor coast, losing people to emigration. In thirty years it has become one of the best-known destinations in southern Italy, and the change has been abrupt enough that older residents talk about it as a different place.