Calabria - a brief history

Calabria is situated on the Ionian Sea at the south coast of Italy in the 'arch' of the boot.


A brief history of the region:

Greeks settled heavily along the coast at an early date and several of their settlements, including Sybaris, Croton, and Locri, were numbered among the leading cities of Magna Graecia during the 6th and 5th centuries BC. Conquered by the Romans in the 3rd century BC, the region never regained its former prosperity.

After the fall of the Roman Empire the inhabitants were in large part driven inland by the spread of malaria and, from the early Middle Ages until the XVII century, by pirate raids. Calabria was devastated during the Gothic War before it came under the rule of a local dux for the Byzantine Empire. In the 9th and 10th centuries, Calabria, which had been the rich breadbasket of Rome before Egypt was conquered, was the borderland between Byzantine rule and the Arab emirs in Sicily, subject to raids and skirmishes, depopulated and demoralized, with vibrant Greek monasteries providing fortresses of culture. In the 1060s, Normans under the leadership of Robert Guiscard's brother Roger established a presence in this borderland, and organized a government along Byzantine lines that was run by the local Greek magnates of Calabria. In 1098, Pope Urban II bestowed on Roger the equivalence of an apostolic legate and the Hauteville clan formed the precursors of the Kingdom of Naples which in one form or another ruled Calabria until the unification of Italy. This kingdom itself came under many rulers: the Habsburg dynasties of both Spain and Austria; the French Bourbon dynasty, and briefly Napoleon's general Joachim Murat, who was executed in the small town of Pizzo.

Throughout all this, Calabria remained a very rural and exploited region. The Aspromonte, a mountainous region of southern Calabria, was the scene of a famous battle of the Risorgimento (unification of Italy), in which Garibaldi was wounded. Several important philosophers (namely, Bernardino Telesio from Cosenza, Gioacchino da Fiore from San Giovanni in Fiore, Tommaso Campanella from Stilo) came from Calabria, and famous Americans of Calabrian descent are almost too numerous to name.

The seawater around Calabria is very clear, and there is a good level of tourist accommodation. The poet Gabriele d'Annunzio called the Sicily-facing seafront at Reggio "The most beautiful kilometer in Italy".

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