Calabria

Calabria is a region in Southern Italy. It is a peninsula bordered by the region Basilicata to the north, the Ionian Sea to the east, the Strait of Messina to the southwest, which separates it from Sicily, and the Tyrrhenian Sea to the west. It has almost 2 million residents across a total area of 15,222 km (5,877 sq mi). Catanzaro is the region's capital.
Calabria is the birthplace of the name of Italy, given to it by the Ancient Greeks who settled in this land starting from the 8th century BC. They established the first cities, mainly on the coast, as Greek colonies. During this period Calabria was the heart of Magna Graecia, home of key figures in history such as Pythagoras, Herodotus and Milo.
In Roman times, it was part of the Regio III Lucania et Bruttii, a region of Augustan Italy. After the Gothic War, it became and remained for five centuries a Byzantine dominion, fully recovering its Greek character. Cenobitism flourished, with the rise throughout the peninsula of numerous churches, hermitages and monasteries in which Basilian monks were dedicated to transcription. The Byzantines introduced the art of silk in Calabria and made it the main silk production area in Europe. In the 11th century, the Norman conquest started a slow process of Latinization.
In Calabria there are three historical ethnolinguistics minorities: the Grecanici, speaking Calabrian Greek; the Arbëreshë people; and the Occitans of Guardia Piemontese. This extraordinary linguistic diversity makes the region an object of study for linguists from all over the world.
Calabria is famous for its crystal clear sea waters and is dotted with ancient villages, castles and archaeological parks. Three national parks are found in the region: the Pollino National Park (which is the largest in Italy), the Sila National Park and the Aspromonte National Park.
Starting in the third century BC, the name Calabria was originally given to the Adriatic coast of the Salento peninsula in modern Apulia. In the late first century BC this name came to extend to the entirety of the Salento, when the Roman emperor Augustus divided Italy into regions. The whole region of Apulia received the name Regio II Apulia et Calabria. By this time modern Calabria was still known as Bruttium, after the Bruttians who inhabited the region. Later in the seventh century AD, the Byzantine Empire created the Duchy of Calabria from the Salento and the Ionian part of Bruttium. Even though the Calabrian part of the duchy was conquered by the Lombards during the eighth and ninth centuries AD, the Byzantines continued to use the name Calabria for their remaining territory in Bruttium.
Originally the Greeks used Italoi to indicate the native population of modern Calabria, which according to some ancient Greek writers was derived from a legendary king of the Oenotri, Italus.
Over time the Greeks started to use Italoi for the rest of the southern Italian peninsula as well. After the Roman conquest of the region, the name was used for the entire Italian peninsula and eventually the Alpine region too.
The region is generally known as the "toe" of the Italian Peninsula, and is a long and narrow peninsula which stretches from north to south for 248 km (154 mi), with a maximum width of 110 km (68 mi). Some 42% of Calabria's area, corresponding to 15,080 km, is mountainous, 49% is hilly, while plains occupy only 9% of the region's territory. It is surrounded by the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas. It is separated from Sicily by the Strait of Messina, where the narrowest point between Capo Peloro in Sicily and Punta Pezzo in Calabria is only 3.2 km (2 mi).
Three mountain ranges are present: Pollino, La Sila, and Aspromonte, each with its own flora and fauna. The Pollino Mountains in the north of the region are rugged and form a natural barrier separating Calabria from the rest of Italy. Parts of the area are heavily wooded, while others are vast, wind-swept plateaus with little vegetation. These mountains are home to a rare Bosnian Pine variety and are included in the Pollino National Park, which is the largest national park in Italy, covering 1,925.65 square kilometres.
La Sila, which has been referred to as the "Great Wood of Italy", is a vast mountainous plateau about 1,200 m (3,900 ft) above sea level and stretches for nearly 2,000 km (770 sq mi) along the central part of Calabria. The highest point is Botte Donato, which reaches 1,928 m (6,325 ft). The area boasts numerous lakes and dense coniferous forests. La Sila also has some of the tallest trees in Italy which are called the "Giants of the Sila" and can reach up to 40 m (130 ft) in height. The Sila National Park is also known to have the purest air in Europe.
The Aspromonte massif forms the southernmost tip of the Italian peninsula bordered by the sea on three sides. This unique mountainous structure reaches its highest point at Montalto, at 1,995 m (6,545 ft), and is full of wide, man-made terraces that slope down toward the sea.
Most of the lower terrain in Calabria has been agricultural for centuries, and exhibits indigenous scrubland as well as introduced plants such as the prickly pear cactus. The lowest slopes are rich in vineyards and orchards of citrus fruit, including the Diamante citron. Further up, olives and chestnut trees appear while in the higher regions there are often dense forests of oak, pine, beech and fir trees.
Calabria's climate is influenced by the sea and mountains. The Mediterranean climate is typical of the coastal areas with considerable differences in temperature and rainfall between the seasons, with an average low of 8 °C (46 °F) during the winter months and an average high of 30 °C (86 °F) during the summer months. Mountain areas have a typical mountainous climate with frequent snow during winter. The erratic behavior of the Tyrrhenian Sea can bring heavy rainfall on the western slopes of the region, while hot air from Africa makes the east coast of Calabria dry and warm. The mountains that run along the region also influence the climate and temperature of the region. The east coast is much warmer and has wider temperature ranges than the west coast. The geography of the region causes more rain to fall along the west coast than that of the east coast, which occurs mainly during winter and autumn and less during the summer months.
Below are the two extremes of climate in Calabria, the warm mediterranean subtype on the coastline and the highland climate of Monte Scuro.
Calabria is commonly considered part of the "Calabrian Arc", an arc-shaped geographic domain extending from the southern part of the Basilicata Region to the northeast of Sicily, and including the Peloritano Mountains (although some authors extend this domain from Naples in the north to Palermo in the southwest). The Calabrian area shows basement (crystalline and metamorphic rocks) of Paleozoic and younger ages, covered by (mostly Upper) Neogene sediments. Studies have revealed that these rocks comprise the upper part of a pile of thrust sheets which dominate the Apennines and the Sicilian Maghrebides.
The Neogene evolution of the Central Mediterranean system is dominated by the migration of the Calabrian Arc to the southeast, overriding the African Plate and its promontories.) The main tectonic elements of the Calabrian Arc are the southern Apennines fold-and-thrust belt, the "Calabria-Peloritani", or simply Calabrian block and the Sicilian Maghrebides fold-and-thrust belt. The foreland area is formed by the Apulia Platform, which is part of the Adriatic Plate, and the Ragusa or Iblean Platform, which is an extension of the African Plate. These platforms are separated by the Ionian Basin. The Tyrrhenian oceanized basin is regarded as the back-arc basin. This subduction system therefore shows the southern plates of African affinity subducting below the northern plates of European affinity.
The geology of Calabria has been studied for more than a century. The earlier works were mainly dedicated to the evolution of the basement rocks of the area. The Neogene sedimentary successions were merely regarded as "post-orogenic" infill of "neo-tectonic" tensional features. In the course of time, however, a shift can be observed in the temporal significance of these terms, from post-Eocene to post-Early Miocene to post-middle Pleistocene.
The region is seismically active and is generally ascribed to the re-establishment of an equilibrium after the latest (mid-Pleistocene) deformation phase. Some authors believe that the subduction process is still ongoing, which is a matter of debate.
Calabria has one of the oldest records of human presence in Italy, which date back to around 700,000 BC when a type of Homo erectus evolved leaving traces around coastal areas. During the Paleolithic period Stone Age humans created the "Bos Primigenius", a figure of a bull on a cliff which dates back around 12,000 years in the Romito Cave in the town of Papasidero. When the Neolithic period came the first villages were founded around 3,500 BC.
According to the Greeks, the region would have been inhabited before colonization by several communities, including the Ausones-Oenotrians (vine-growers), who were the Italians, Morgetes, Sicels, and Chone. It is said that it was from the mythical ruler Italus that Calabria was called “Italy”. The figure of Italus is placed in the first half of the 15th century BC. Antiochus of Syracuse, considered the first historian of the West, depicts him as “A good and wise king, capable of subduing neighboring peoples making use of persuasion and force from time to time”.
Around 1500 BC a tribe called the Oenotri ("vine-cultivators"), settled in the region. Ancient sources state they were Greeks who were led to the region by their king, Oenotrus. However it is believed they were an ancient Italic people who spoke an Italic language. During the eighth and seventh centuries BC, Greek settlers founded many colonies (settlements) on the coast of southern Italy. In Calabria they founded Chone (Pallagorio), Cosentia (Cosenza), Clampetia (Amantea), Scyllaeum (Scilla), Sybaris (Sibari), Hipponion (Vibo Valentia), Locri Epizephyrii (Locri), Kaulon (Monasterace), Krimisa (Cirò Marina), Kroton (Crotone), Laüs (comune of Santa Maria del Cedro), Medma (Rosarno), Metauros (Gioia Tauro), Petelia (Strongoli), Rhégion (Reggio Calabria), Scylletium (Borgia), Temesa (Campora San Giovanni), Terina (Nocera Terinese), Pandosia (Acri) and Thurii, (Thurio, comune of Corigliano Calabro).
In the year 744 B.C. a group of Chalcidian settlers founded the city of Rhegion (today Reggio Calabria) at the southern end of the Calabrian peninsula. Soon after, again the Chalcidans founded Zancle (current Messina) on the other side of the strait, securing their dominion over that arm of the sea. Later Chalcidian settlers from Rhegion and Zancle would found Metauros (Gioia Tauro), divided the river of the same name (today Petrace) from the Italic city of the Tauri.
In 710 B.C. Ionian colonists founded Sybaris on the fertile plain of the same name at the mouth of the Crati. From this colony would later originate the founding of Paestum (in Lucania), Lao (at the mouth of the river of the same name) and Scidros (between Cetraro and Belvedere Marittimo). Ionian colonies were Clampetia [it] (in the area between Amantea and San Lucido), Temesa (between Amantea and Nocera Terinese), Terina (in the plain of Sant'Eufemia), Krimisa (Cirò Marina), Petelia (Strongoli).
In 743 B.C. Achaean settlers instead founded Kroton (current Crotone), on the point now known as Capo Colonna. Crotonians and Sybarites would later become rivals. But meanwhile, the Crotonians founded the colonies of Caulonia (near today's Monasterace Marina) and Scillezio (Squillace). Around 700 B.C. Crotonian colonists founded Bristacia, current Umbriatico.
Around 680 B.C. colonists who came from the Greek Locris founded Locri Epizhephyrii, near present-day Locri. Colonies of the Locrians were Hipponion (Vibo Valentia) and Medma (Rosarno).
The Bruttians, similar to the neighboring Lucanians, declared themselves independent of their “cousins” from beyond the Pollino around the 4th century B.C., forming themselves into a confederate state. The capital of the federates was Consentia, present-day Cosenza. It was one of the main cities along with Pandosia, a city whose traces have been lost; some historical references locate it among the municipalities of Castrolibero, Marano Principato, and Marano Marchesato, while other recent archaeological discoveries would locate the city near the present city of Acri, Aufugum (Montalto Uffugo), Argentanum (San Marco Argentano), Bergae, Besidiae (Bisignano), and Lymphaeum (Luzzi).
Between 560 and 550 B.C. a decade-long war was fought between Kroton and Locri Epizephyrii, which was resolved by the battle on the Sagra River, which saw the alliance between the people of Reggio and Locri emerge victorious.
In 510 B.C. the Crotonians attacked nearby Sybaris, and faced the Sybarites on the River Trionto, in a clash between 100,000 Crotonians and 300,000 Sybarites. The Dorians won the battle and occupied Sybaris by sacking it for 70 days and diverting the waters of the Crati River onto the ruins of the city.
In 444 B.C. Athenian and Peloponnesian colonists founded, on the site of the destroyed Sybaris, the colony of Turi, at the behest of Pericles in the détente plan related to the Thirty Years' Peace in the Peloponnesian War.
In 338 BC. Locri asked Dionysius of Syracuse for help against the expansion of Reggio (no longer allied with the Locrians) and Croton. The Syracusans intervened in the Calabrian peninsula by defeating the Crotonians on the narrowest point of the river Sagra, current Allaro, and occupying Croton for ten years, an event that put an end to the power of the Crotonians; similar fate befell Reggio, which although having resisted the numerous attacks of Dionysius of Syracuse, in 386 BC after eleven months of siege was taken by the Syracusans, and for some years also weakened in its political power.
Rhegion was the birthplace of one of the famed nine lyric poets, Ibycus and Metauros was the birthplace of another, Stesichorus, who was amongst the first lyric poets of the western world. Kroton spawned many victors during the ancient Olympics and other Panhellenic Games. Amongst the most famous were Milo of Croton, who won six wrestling events in six Olympics in a row, along with seven events in the Pythian Games, nine events in the Nemean Games and ten events in the Isthmian Games and also Astylos of Croton, who won six running events in three Olympics in a row. Through Alcmaeon of Croton (a philosopher and medical theorist) and Pythagoras (a mathematician and philosopher), who moved to Kroton in 530 BC, the city became a renowned center of philosophy, science and medicine. The Greeks of Sybaris created "Intellectual Property." The Sybarites founded at least 20 other colonies, including Poseidonia (Paestum in Latin, on the Tyrrhenian coast of Lucania), Laüs (on the border with Lucania) and Scidrus (on the Lucanian coast in the Gulf of Taranto). Locri was renowned for being the town where Zaleucus created the first Western Greek law, the "Locrian Code" and the birthplace of ancient epigrammist and poet Nossis.
The Greek cities of Calabria came under pressure from the Lucanians who conquered the north of Calabria and pushed further south, taking over part of the interior, probably after they defeated the Thurians near Laus in 390 BC. A few decades later the Bruttii took advantage of the weakening of the Greek cites caused by wars between them and took over Hipponium, Terina and Thurii. The Bruttii helped the Lucanians fight Alexander of Epirus (334–32 BC), who had come to the aid of Tarentum (in Apulia), which was also pressured by the Lucanians. After this, Agathocles of Syracuse ravaged the coast of Calabria with his fleet, took Hipponium and forced the Bruttii into unfavourable peace terms. However, they soon seized Hipponium again. After Agathloces' death in 289 BC the Lucanians and Bruttii pushed into the territory of Thurii and ravaged it. The city sent envoys to Rome to ask for help in 285 BC and 282 BC. On the second occasion, the Romans sent forces to garrison the city. This was part of the episode which sparked the Pyrrhic war.
With the passage of time the name Italy was consolidated in common usage beginning to define the inhabitants of the city-states of the Mezzogiorno first as Italiotes, then Italics with the arrival of the Romans and, only much later would it move up the peninsula to define “Italy” in its entirety with the conquest of Cisalpine Gaul by Julius Caesar.
At the beginning of the 3rd century BC the cities of southern Italy, which had been allies of the Samnites, were still independent but inevitably came into conflict as a result of Rome's continuous expansion as their expansion in central and northern Italy had not been sufficient to provide new arable lands they needed.
Between 280 and 275 BC the Tarentine War was fought between Rome and Taranto. The latter sought help from Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, who in 280, together with his allies, the Bruttians and Lucanians, defeated the Romans at the Battle of Heraclea, thanks to the use of elephants. But Pyrrhus was later defeated by the Romans at Maluentum (current Benevento) in 275 and retreated to Sicily, where Syracuse needed help against the Carthaginians. Transiting through Calabria, Pyrrhus' army is said to have sacked the shrine of Persephone in Locri, running - it is said - into the wrath of the gods. This, combined with the fact that Rome had formed alliances with some of the last poleis of Magna Graecia, including Reggio, caused Pyrrhus to return home.
After Pyrrhus was eventually defeated, to avoid Roman revenge the Bruttii submitted willingly and gave up half of the Sila, a mountainous plateau valuable for its pitch and timber. Rome subjugated southern Italy by means of treaties with the cities.
Between 264 and 251 BC the First Punic War was fought in Sicily, between Rome and Carthage, which would end with the creation of the Roman province of Sicily. Following the Carthaginian provocation with the siege of Saguntum, Spain, the Second Punic War broke out in 217 BC. The Carthaginian general Hannibal, after taking Saguntum and Marseille, crossed the Alps and defeated the Romans at the Trebbia River, the Ticino River, Lake Trasimeno, and in 216 BC at Cannae in Apulia.
After the victory at Cannae, Hannibal achieved his first important political-strategic results. He then made a brief raid on the Roman Ager before retiring to Capua for his leisure. Hannibal sent his brother Mago with part of his forces into Bruttium to accommodate the surrender of those cities that abandoned the Romans and to force out those that refused to do so. The people of Petelia, who remained loyal to the Romans, were attacked not only by the Carthaginians, who occupied their region, but also by the Bruttians who had instead allied themselves with Hannibal. After withstanding a long siege, which lasted 11 months, because the Romans were unable to help them, with their consent, they surrendered. The city was conquered and Hannibal led the army to Cosenza, which, after a less harsh defense, fell to the Carthaginians. At the same time an army of Bruttians, besieged and occupied another Greek city, Croton, except for the fortress alone, inhabited by less than 2,000 people. The Locrians also passed to the Bruttians and the Carthaginians. Only the Regginians preserved their loyalty to Rome and their independence to the last.
Hannibal also had a history of the Punic Wars written on the Carthaginian side, and ordered it to be kept in the temple of Juno Lacinia in Crotone so that the Romans could not falsify the history of the war. Plutarch, writing his work, also drew from that source. But in the summer of 204 B.C. they Romans arrived in Calabria and enslaved the Bruttians to punish them for their rebellion. Vast estates were requisitioned and assigned to members of the Roman aristocracy.
During the Second Punic War (218–201 BC) the Bruttii allied with Hannibal, who sent Hanno, one of his commanders, to Calabria. Hanno marched toward Capua (in Campania) with Bruttian soldiers to take them to Hannibal's headquarters there twice, but he was defeated on both occasions. When his campaign in Italy came to a dead end, Hannibal took refuge in Calabria, whose steep mountains provided protection against the Roman legions. He set up his headquarters in Kroton and stayed there for four years until he was recalled to Carthage. The Romans fought a battle with him near Kroton, but its details are unknown. Many Calabrian cities surrendered to the Romans and Calabria was put under a military commander.
Nearly a decade after the war, the Romans set up colonies in Calabria: at Tempsa and Kroton (Croto in Latin) in 194 BC, Copiae in the territory of Thurii (Thurium in Latin) in 193 BC, and Vibo Valentia in the territory of Hipponion in 192 BC.
Starting in the third century BC, the name Calabria was given to the Adriatic coast of the Salento peninsula in modern Apulia. In the late first century BC this name came to extend to the entirety of the Salento, when the Roman emperor Augustus divided Italy into regions and modern Calabria was known as Regio III Lucania et Bruttii.
From 186 B.C., repression of the Bacchanalia, and of the Greek cult of Bacchus, is triggered throughout Magna Graecia as part of a plan to Romanize southern Italy.
Between 136 and 132 BC, the First Servile War was fought in Sicily. The Syrian slave Eunus gathered some 200,000 serfs, proclaiming himself king, and for a full four years held out against the Roman legions from the strongholds of Enna and Taormina. Eventually Rome crushed the repression and had 20 000 slaves crucified throughout the island. The servile war was an expression of the discontent of the slave class, who were disenfranchised and on whom the entire Roman economy rested.
Still in 132 B.C. the consul Popilius Lenate ordered the construction of the Via Capua-Rhegium, also known as Via Popilia, which, tracing the route now occupied by the A2 Highway and State Road 18 Tirrena, reached Reggio. In this period the main towns in Calabria were Cosenza, Crotone, Temesa, Turi, Vibo Valentia Taurianum, and Reggio.
Between 91 and 89 BCE the Social War was fought, at the end of which the Roman Senate granted the Italics Roman citizenship.
Between 73 and 71 B.C. the Second Servile War was fought, during which the Thracian gladiator Spartacus gathered around him tens of thousands of desperate slaves, including many Bruttians, and set out from Capua northward, defeating many Roman legions. But the intervention of Lucius Licinius Crassus will crush in a battle on the Sele River in Campania any claim of Spartacus and his men. 6,000 slaves will be crucified along the Appian Way.
Magna Graecia is commiserated by Marcus Tullius Cicero in a 44 B.C. letter written from Calabria, during the journey to Greece that the orator undertook in the confusing situation determined after Caesar's assassination on the Ides of March.
In rearranging Italy's political geography, Octavian Augustus merged Calabria and Basilicata into Regio III Lucania et Bruttii, with the capital and seat of the corrector in Reggio, the region's largest city.
Also Augustus exiled his daughter Julia, guilty of excessive sentimental vivacity, to Reggio.
In 61 Paul the Apostle passed through Reggio one day on his way to Rome. Christianity spread in Calabria to the port centers and along the Via Popilia, vital areas of the Roman region.
Emperor Trajan will have the Via Traiana opened during his rule, which is roughly traced by the old State Road 18 Tirrena halfway up the coast.
In 305 the Calabrian patrician of Bruttian origin Bulla rebelled against the Roman Empire with 600 horsemen and 5,000 infantrymen. He was defeated by the imperial militia, but Rome could never fully control the forests of Sila.
On October 1, 313 Constantine I promulgated the Edict of Milan in favor of Christianity, which began to spread more and more so that in 391 Emperor Theodosius I proclaimed it the state religion. In 363 Basil the Great landed in Calabria. He was then in Caesarea. It was his disciples who from the ninth century founded various monasteries and cenobia, laying the foundations of the Calabrian-Greek monastic tradition.
In 365 an earthquake accompanied by a tidal wave shook the southern Mediterranean, affecting the coastal towns of Calabria.
The Roman Empire split into two branches. The Western branch, ruled by Honorius with its capital in Ravenna, suffered in 410 the invasion of Alaric's Visigoths, who sacked Rome and then marched south. Legend has it that Alaric died in Cosenza, being buried at the confluence of the Crati and Busento under the two rivers.
With the fall of the western part of the Roman Empire in 476, Italy was taken over by the Germanic chieftain Odoacer and later became part of the Ostrogothic Kingdom in 489. The Ostrogothic kings ruled officially as Magistri Militum of the Byzantine Emperors and all government and administrative positions were held by the Romans, while all primary laws were legislated by the Byzantine Emperor. Therefore, during the sixth century, under the Ostrogoths' rule, Romans could still be at the center of government and cultural life, such as the Roman Cassiodorus who, like Boethius and Symmachus, emerged as one of the most prominent men of his time. He was an administrator, politician, scholar and historian who was born in Scylletium (near Catanzaro). He spent most of his career trying to bridge the divides of East and West, Greek and Latin cultures, Romans and Goths, and official Christianity and Arian Christianity, which was the form of Christianity of the Ostrogoths and which had earlier been banned. He set up his Vivarium (monastery) in Scylletium. He oversaw the collation of three editions of the Bible in Latin. Seeing the practicality of uniting all the books of the Bible in one volume, he was the first who produced Latin Bibles in single volumes. The most well-known of them was the Codex Grandior which was the ancestor of all modern western Bibles.
Cassiodorus was at the heart of the administration of the Ostrogothic kingdom. Theodoric made him quaestor sacri palatii (quaestor of the sacred palace, the senior legal authority) in 507, governor of Lucania and Bruttium, consul in 514 and magister officiorum (master of offices, one of the most senior administrative officials) in 523. He was praetorian prefect (chief minister) under the successors of Theodoric: under Athalaric (Theodoric's grandson, reigned 526–34) in 533 and, between 535 and 537, under Theodahad (Theodoric's nephew, reigned 534–36) and Witiges (Theodoric's grandson-in-law, reigned, 536–40). The major works of Cassiodorus, besides the mentioned bibles, were the Historia Gothorum, a history of the Goths, the Variae and account of his administrative career and the Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum, an introduction to the study of the sacred scriptures and the liberal arts which was very influential in the Middle Ages.
Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Emperor Justinian I, retook Italy from the Ostrogoths between 535 and 556. They soon lost much of Italy to the Lombards between 568 and 590, but retained the south for around 500 years until 1059–1071, where they thrived and where the Greek language was the official and vernacular language. In Calabria and towns such as Stilo and Rossano and San Demetrio Corone achieved great religious status. From the 7th Century many monasteries were built in the Amendolea and Stilaro Valleys and Stilo was the destination of hermits and Basilian monks. Many Byzantine churches are still seen in the region. The 10th-century church in Rossano, together with the "twin" church of Sant'Adriano in San Demetrio Corone (foundation 955, rebuilt by the Normans on the, still, visible foundations of the previous Byzantine church), are considered between the best preserved Byzantine churches in Italy. They were both built by St. Nilus the Younger as a retreat for the monks who lived in the tufa grottos underneath. The present name of Calabria comes from the duchy of Calabria.
Around the year 800, Saracens began invading the shores of Calabria, attempting to wrest control of the area from the Byzantines. This group of Arabs had already been successful in Sicily and knew that Calabria was another key spot. The people of Calabria retreated into the mountains for safety. Although the Arabs never really got a stronghold on the whole of Calabria, they did control some villages while enhancing trade relations with the eastern world. In 918, Saracens captured Reggio (which was renamed Rivà), holding many of its inhabitants to ransom or keeping them prisoners as slaves. It is during this time of Arab invasions that many staples of today's Calabrian cuisine came into fashion: Citrus fruits and eggplants for example. Exotic spices such as cloves and nutmeg were also introduced.
Under the Byzantine dominion, between the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 10th century, Calabria was one of the first regions of Italy to introduce silk production to Europe. According to André Guillou, mulberry trees for the production of raw silk were introduced to southern Italy by the Byzantines at the end of the ninth century. Around 1050 the theme of Calabria had 24,000, mulberry trees cultivated for their foliage, and their number tended to expand.
At the beginning of the tenth century (c. 903), the city of Catanzaro was occupied by the Muslim Saracens, who founded an emirate and took the Arab name of قطنصار – Qaṭanṣār. An Arab presence is evidenced by findings at an eighth-century necropolis which had items with Arabic inscriptions. Around the year 1050, Catanzaro rebelled against Saracen dominance and returned to a brief period of Byzantine control.
In the 1060s the Normans, under the leadership of Robert Guiscard's brother, Roger I of Sicily, established a presence in this borderland, and organized a government modeled on the Eastern Roman Empire and was run by the local magnates of Calabria. Of note is that the Normans established their presence here, in southern Italy (namely Calabria), 6 years prior to their conquest of England, (see The Battle of Hastings). The purpose of this strategic presence in Calabria was to lay the foundations for the Crusades 30 years later, and for the creation of two Kingdoms: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the Kingdom of Sicily. Ships would sail from Calabria to the Holy Land. This made Calabria one of the richest regions in Europe as princes from the noble families of England, France and other regions, constructed secondary residences and palaces here, on their way to the Holy Land. Guiscard's son Bohemond, who was born in San Marco Argentano, would be one of the leaders in the first crusade. Of particular note is the Via Francigena, an ancient pilgrim route that goes from Canterbury to Rome and southern Italy, reaching Calabria, Basilicata and Apulia, where the crusaders lived, prayed and trained, respectively.
In 1098, Roger I of Sicily was named the equivalent of an apostolic legate by Pope Urban II. His son Roger II of Sicily later became the first King of Sicily and formed what would become the Kingdom of Sicily, which lasted nearly 700 years. Under the Normans southern Italy was united as one region and started a feudal system of land ownership in which the Normans were made lords of the land while peasants performed all the work on the land.
In 1147, Roger II of Sicily attacked Corinth and Thebes, two important centers of Byzantine silk production, capturing the weavers and their equipment and establishing his own silkworks in Calabria, thereby causing the Norman silk industry to flourish.
In 1194, Frederick II, took control of the region, after inheriting the Kingdom from his mother Constance, Queen of Sicily. He created a kingdom that blended cultures, philosophy and customs and would build several castles, while fortifying existing ones which the Normans previously constructed. After the death of Frederick II in 1250, Calabria was controlled by the Capetian House of Anjou, under the rule of Charles d’Anjou after being granted the crown of the Sicilian Kingdom by Pope Clement IV. In 1282, under Charles d’Anjou, Calabria became a domain of the newly created Kingdom of Naples, and no longer of the Kingdom of Sicily, after he lost Sicily due to the rebellion of the Sicilian Vespers. During the 14th century, would emerge Barlaam of Seminara who would be Petrarch's Greek teacher and his disciple Leonzio Pilato, who would translate Homer's works for Giovanni Boccaccio.
While the cultivation of mulberry was moving first steps in northern Italy, silk made in Calabria reached the peak of 50% of the whole Italian/European production. As the cultivation of mulberry was difficult in Northern and Continental Europe, merchants and operators used to purchase in Calabria raw materials to finish the products and resell them for a better price. The Genoese silk artisans used fine Calabrian silk for the production of velvets. In particular, the silk of Catanzaro supplied almost all of Europe and was sold in a large market fair to Spanish, Venetian, Genoese, Florentine and Dutch merchants. Catanzaro became the lace capital of Europe with a large silkworm breeding facility that produced all the laces and linens used in the Vatican. The city was known for its fabrication of silks, velvets, damasks and brocades.
The settlement in the land of Calabria of Waldensian peoples from the valleys bordering the Western Alps - predominantly the Germanasca, Chisone and Pellice valleys - might have taken place in the Swabian period, in the 13th century, although it spread mainly from the first half of the 14th century.
Historian Pierre Gilles, author in 1644 of A History of the Reformed Churches, recounts how in 1315 some landowners in Calabria offered the Waldensians land to cultivate, in exchange for an annual fee, with the power to establish communities there free of feudal obligations. This would have favored the founding, or repopulation, of numerous urban centers, such as San Sisto and La Guardia (now called Guardia Piemontese because of its Waldensian origins), inhabited mainly by Waldensians, thus giving rise to a linguistic island in central Calabria, where the most common dialect is Occitan, a dialect typical of the Aosta Valley and northern Piedmont. Here the Waldensian community would live until the second half of the 16th century, when, during the European wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants, the Waldensians adhered to the Lutheran faith, suffering persecution by the Spanish viceroyal authorities.
In the 15th century, Catanzaro was exporting both its silk cloth and its technical skills to neighbouring Sicily. By the middle of the century, silk spinning was taking place in Catanzaro, on a large scale. In the 15th century, Catanzaro's silk industry supplied almost all of Europe and was sold at large fairs to Spanish, Venetian, Genoan, Florentine, and Dutch merchants. Catanzaro became Europe's silk capital with a large silkworm farm that produced all the lace used in the Vatican. The city was famous for its manufacture of silks, velvets, damasks and brocades. In 1519, Emperor Charles V formally recognized the growth of Catanzaro's silk industry, allowing the city to establish a consulate of silk crafts, charged with regulating and controlling the various stages of a production that flourished throughout the 16th century.
In 1442, the Aragonese took control under Alfonso V of Aragon who became ruler under the Crown of Aragon. In 1501 Calabria came under the control of Ferdinand II of Aragon, whose wife Queen Isabella of Castille is famed for sponsoring the first voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492. Calabria suffered greatly under Aragonese rule with heavy taxes, feuding landlords, starvation and sickness. After a brief period in the early 1700s under the Austrian Habsburgs, Calabria came into the control of the Spanish Bourbons in 1735. It was during the 16th century that Calabria would contribute to modern world history with the creation of the Gregorian calendar by the Calabrian doctor and astronomer Luigi Lilio.
In 1466, King Louis XI decided to develop a national silk industry in Lyon and called a large number of Italian workers, mainly from Calabria. The fame of the master weavers of Catanzaro spread throughout France and they were invited to Lyon to teach the techniques of weaving. In 1470, one of these weavers, known in France as Jean Le Calabrais, invented the first prototype of a Jacquard-type loom. He introduced a new kind of machine which was able to work the yarns faster and more precisely. Over the years, improvements to the loom were ongoing.
Charles V of Spain formally recognized the growth of the silk industry of Catanzaro in 1519 by allowing the city to establish a consulate of the silk craft, charged with regulating and check in the various stages of a production that flourished throughout the sixteenth century. At the moment of the creation of its guild, the city declared that it had over 500 looms. By 1660, when the town had about 16,000 inhabitants, its silk industry kept 1,000 looms, and at least 5,000 people, busy. The silk textiles of Catanzaro were not only sold at the kingdom's markets, they were also exported to Venice, France, Spain and England.
This period also saw the migration of entire communities of Albanians to many towns in northern Calabria, called by the king of Naples himself in recognition of the services that the Albanian leader Gjergj Kastrioti Skanderbeg had rendered to the crown against the Angevins. After 1478 the sovereign allowed these refugees fleeing from the Turkish advance in Albania after Skanderbeg's demise to occupy abandoned villages for the purpose of repopulating them, also granting them numerous royal privileges and franchises: hence the Arbëreshë community was born.
In the 16th century, Calabria was characterized by a strong demographic and economic development, mainly due to the increasing demand of silk products and the simultaneous growth of prices, and became one of the most important Mediterranean markets for silk.
After the relative pacification, Calabria followed the historical and political events of the Kingdom of Naples, also becoming the scene of struggles between the great powers of the time, France and Spain, for territorial control of the Italian peninsula. For example, on June 28, 1495, the Battle of Seminara, north of Reggio Calabria, took place, where French troops that had occupied the Kingdom of Naples beat the Hispano-Napolitan army under the command of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba and Ferdinand II of Naples, who, however, managed to take revenge and drive out the French the following year. A few years later, in 1502, Córdoba himself conquered Reggio, subjecting it to the rule of the Ferdinand II.
From then on, Calabria was placed under Spanish rule for two centuries and was administratively divided into two parts: Calabria Ulteriore [it] and Calabria Citeriore [it], initially governed by a single governor, then, from 1582, by two separate officials. The administrative capital of Calabria Citeriore was Cosenza, which during the 16th century went through an impressive artistic and humanistic flowering, so much so that it was called the “Athens of Calabria”. In fact, the city, in addition to being, until 1557, one of the most important cities of the realm in the head of law, became, after Naples, the second city to have a school of cartography, while in 1511 the Accademia Cosentina was born, founded by Aulo Giano Parrasio, followed by the philosopher Bernardino Telesio, defined by Francis Bacon as the first of the "new men". Instead, Calabria Ulteriore had two different administrative headquarters: the first was Reggio Calabria, which held the role of capital for 12 years, from 1582 to 1594, losing it due to Turkish raids that sacked it several times; for this reason, from 1594 the seat of the administrative offices of the governorate was transferred to Catanzaro, which maintained this role for more than 220 years. In 1563 philosopher and natural scientist Bernardino Telesio wrote "On the Nature of Things according to their Own Principles" and pioneered early modern empiricism. He would also influence the works of Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella and Thomas Hobbes. In 1602 philosopher and poet Tommaso Campanella wrote his most famous work, "The City of the Sun" and would later defend Galileo Galilei during his first trial with his work "A Defense of Galileo", which was written in 1616 and published in 1622. In 1613 philosopher and economist Antonio Serra wrote "A Short Treatise on the Wealth and Poverty of Nations" and was a pioneer in the Mercantilist tradition.
Calabria was important to the Spanish monarchs since the reign of Emperor Charles V of Habsburg, who also held the title of King of Naples, as when the sovereign granted numerous royal privileges to the city of Catanzaro, which had valiantly resisted on August 28, 1528, the siege by a French army supported by some Calabrian and Apulian nobles of Francophile tendencies. In gratitude, Charles V granted the city the right to use the imperial eagle as its symbol, exempted it from royal tributes and gave it the power to mint coins worth one carlin. In addition, the emperor personally visited the region in 1535 on his return from the victorious capture of Tunis, where, at the command of a fleet of as many as 500 ships, he had defeated the Ottoman army and freed 20,000 Christian slaves. After the African conquest, Charles V landed in Sicily and then in Calabria, where, having passed Aspromonte, he visited Nicastro, Martirano, Carpanzano, Rogliano, Tessano and Cosenza. From here the monarch passed through Bisignano, Castrovillari and Laino, and then continued on to Naples. During Spanish rule in Calabria, many towns tried to defend themselves from Saracen raids, for example Gioja (current Gioia Tauro), which was fortified with city walls reinforced by watchtowers to defend against incursions. Several Calabrian cities such as Palmi (where the Saracen Tower still stands today) and Reggio Calabria were fortified with towers.
Despite the heavy taxation and the growth of baronial power, the population never ceased to show loyalty to the sovereign, seen as a defender of the poor people against the abuses of the powerful. The behavior of the people of Catanzaro in 1647-1648, when, exasperated by the excessive tax burden, they stormed the offices of the tax collectors (known as arrendatori), subsequently setting fire to their houses, must be framed in this light. The governor then intervened, who had the leaders of the revolt hanged, causing the rest of the rebels to flee.
During the 17th century, silk production in Calabria begin to suffer by the strong competition of new-raising competitors in Italian Peninsula and Europe (France), but also the increasing import from Ottoman Empire and Persia.
Foundation of the historical Italo-Albanian College and Library in 1732 by Pope Clement XII transferred from San Benedetto Ullano to San Demetrio Corone in 1794.
In 1783, a series of earthquakes across Calabria caused around 50,000 deaths and much damage to property, so that many of the buildings in the region were rebuilt after this date.
Following the War of the Spanish Succession, the Kingdom of Naples passed in 1707 to Austria, whose Emperor Charles VI of Habsburg also became King of Naples: the Habsburgs, while ruling for a short period, sought to modernize the political structures of the kingdom. In 1733, after the outbreak of the War of Polish Succession, the Spanish Bourbons, allies of France against Austria, decided to attack Naples and secure that kingdom for Charles III of Bourbon, infante of Spain and son of Philip V of Spain. Charles, who entered Naples in 1734, succeeded in defeating the Austrian troops at the Battle of Bitonto, securing control of the kingdom, despite some pockets of resistance, one of which was Reggio Calabria, which fell on June 20, 1734.
For ten years, however, the young Bourbon monarchy had to cope with the intrigues of the Austrian party present in Naples, which was particularly strong in Calabria, where the Duke of Verzino, who had already armed an infantry regiment against the Infante in 1734, promised the Austrians that he could arm 12,000 rebels for their cause of reconquest during the War of Austrian Succession. But after the Battle of Velletri in 1744, in which King Charles repelled an Austrian invasion of the realm, the Austrian party disappeared, also decimated by the trials and inquisitions of the Bourbon authorities.
The ascension of Charles III of Spain to the Neapolitan throne aroused considerable enthusiasm throughout the continental Mezzogiorno, as the population hoped that now the resources of the Kingdom of Naples would be used for the development of state and social structures. Sicily, too, was united politically with southern Italy, albeit in personal dominion to the Bourbon ruler; this was an advantage for Calabria, which ceased to be a peripheral region of the realm and became once again at the center of the state structure. This was seen in the journey King Charles made to the region in 1735, as he was on his way to Palermo to be crowned King of Sicily: having arrived on January 24 in Calabria Citeriore, welcomed by the dean of the province, the royal procession proceeded on, touching on Sibari, Corigliano, Rossano, Cirò and Strongoli, festively welcomed by the local feudal lords and the archbishop of Rossano, Francesco Maria Muscettola. Then Charles met, on the borders of the province of Calabria Ulterior, the Dean of Catanzaro, to stop later in Crotone, festively welcomed by the local patriciate, and in Cutro, where he was hosted by Giovan Battista Filomarino, prince of the Rocca. Continuing on his journey, the Neapolitan sovereign stayed four days in Catanzaro, receiving the homage of the noble families of De Riso and Schipani; he then went to Monteleone and finally arrived in Palmi, as a guest of Prince Giovan Francesco Grimaldi. From here, Charles embarked in late February for Messina, accompanied by a flotilla of boats arranged by the prince of Scylla, Guglielmo Ruffo.
From the earliest years the reforming action of King Charles, aided by the able Tuscan minister Bernardo Tanucci, was aimed at strengthening central power at the expense of baronial and clerical power, as well as alleviating the social and economic conditions of the humblest strata of the population, but it had modest and alternate results, due to the strong pressures and resistance of the local ruling classes, whose privileges and various particularistic interests were harmed. One particularly reformed field was economic and fiscal: in 1739 the Supreme Magistrate of Commerce was created, consisting of magistrates, technicians, merchants and bankers, with absolute jurisdiction over domestic and foreign trade; in 1741 a Concordat was made with the Holy See, thanks to which from that moment on ecclesiastical properties in the Kingdom of Naples were taxed, while in the same period the so-called Catasto onciario [it] was commissioned, so called because it was evaluated in ounces (nominal currency equal to 6 ducats or 60 carlins), which was supposed to reorder the tax burden by lowering taxes on the poorest. However, the wide exemptions enjoyed by nobles and clergymen represented the concrete resistance of the privileged classes to this attempt at tax reform.
In 1759, however, King Charles, as a result of diplomatic agreements and complicated family events, had to abdicate the throne of Naples to encircle the crown of Spain after the death of his half-brother Ferdinand VI of Spain. The Kingdom of Naples then passed to Charles' son, Ferdinand IV of the Two Sicilies, eight years old, placed under the tutelage of a regency council in which Tanucci had decisive weight. This allowed the continuation of the reforming policy pursued by the minister, particularly in the ecclesiastical field, which culminated in the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Kingdom in 1769 and the forfeiture of their property. Even after Ferdinand came of age, Tanucci remained in office, but in 1774 he was exonerated at the instigation of the new Queen Maria Carolina of Austria, who wanted to bring Naples into the Austrian sphere of influence. However, the king continued the reform season for a time, pandering to the Neapolitan Enlightenment current, consisting of intellectuals such as Ferdinando Galiani, Antonio Genovesi and Gaetano Filangeri.
During this period Calabria experienced a period of strong natural disasters, which were accompanied by profound social and economic changes: this was the case with the plague epidemic of 1743, which struck Reggio Calabria and its surroundings from Messina, delaying for some time the compilation of the cadastre onciario by the local universities. Also the earthquake of 1783, which struck southern Calabria causing the death of about 50,000 people and the total destruction of Reggio, which had to be completely rebuilt according to more rational and linear architectural criteria, while, to meet the immense reconstruction expenses, King Ferdinand IV, who had already sent the prince of Strongoli, Francesco Pignatelli, to cope with emergencies in the earthquake-affected areas, established on June 4, 1784 the Cassa Sacra [it], a governmental body that was to manage the funds derived from the expropriation of abolished ecclesiastical property and monasteries and then devolve them into the reconstruction works; in reality it was the wealthy landowners, members of the nascent agrarian bourgeoisie in search of social climbing, who grabbed the best land at the best price, to the detriment of the baronage and local clergy.
The reforming action of King Ferdinand of Bourbon came to an end after the events immediately following the French Revolution, whose ideas were spreading across continental Europe thanks to the invasion of French revolutionary armies, causing alarm in the courts of the Old Regime. For this very reason, Ferdinand IV in November 1798 joined the anti-French coalition and marched with his army to Rome, where Pope Pius VI had been deposed and the Roman Republic proclaimed there. But the Bourbon army, after its initial successes, showed its organic deficiencies and had to retreat, pursued by French troops supporting the Italian Jacobin revolutionaries, who forced it to leave Naples for Sicily, while on January 21, 1799, the Parthenopean Republic was proclaimed, whose birth certificate was drafted by the Calabrian Jacobin Giuseppe Logoteta [it].
The new republican regime, however, did not consolidate well among the popular strata of the Mezzogiorno, especially in Calabria, where only Cosenza, Catanzaro and Crotone adhered to the republican cause, while the large Ionian centers and the area opposite the Sicilian coast, such as Reggio Calabria, Scilla, Bagnara and Palmi, remained loyal to the Bourbons. This boded well for the Bourbon royals, in exile in Palermo, that they would be able to regain the kingdom in a short time: so Ferdinand gladly accepted Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo's proposal to mobilize the peasant masses of Calabria under the name of the king and religion, form an army and recapture Naples. Having received, on February 7, 1799, the title of “Vicar of the King”, Cardinal Ruffo landed the next day in Calabria, recruiting the first ranks in the family fiefs of Scilla and Bagnara. Soon Ruffo's army, dubbed the Army of the Holy Faith because it marched under the banners of the Church and the throne, grew to 25,000 men, to which were added bands of brigands, stragglers, deserters and even foreign military contingents, such as British, Russians, and Turks. With these men the cardinal succeeded in conquering Paola and Crotone, which were strenuously opposed and cruelly sacked, despite Ruffo's attempts to prevent the looting and violence, and then succeeded, in only four months, in reconquering the entire Kingdom of Naples, granting, in June 1799 an honorable surrender to the last Neapolitan Jacobins barricaded at Fort Saint Elmo. However, it was not respected by either the Bourbon rulers or Admiral Horatio Nelson, who, reneging on the terms of surrender, had 124 Neapolitan revolutionaries hanged, depriving Ruffo of his command.
After regaining the throne, however, King Ferdinand was unable to consolidate his newly regained power, so much so that in 1806, faced with a new French invasion by Napoleon Bonaparte's troops, he again had to take refuge in Palermo, under the protection of the British navy, while the Kingdom of Naples was entrusted by Napoleon to his older brother Joseph Bonaparte. However, numerous outbreaks of legitimist revolts did not mar in the continental Mezzogiorno, such as in Calabria, where a full-fledged popular insurrection, known as the Calabrian Insurrection, broke out, carried out by brigands, peasants and stragglers from the Bourbon army, supported also by British military units that had landed in the region. In order to tame the revolt, which lasted three years, it was necessary to commit substantial forces and two of the best French generals, André Masséna and Jean Maximilien Lamarque, who also employed cruel and ruthless means, such as the right of reprisal against entire villages that flanked the brigands and sung the Bourbon, as in the case of the massacre of Lauria, perpetrated by Massena's soldiers.
In spite of this, the period of Napoleonic rule caused great innovations and upheavals on the social and economic level: in fact, on August 2, 1806, Joseph Bonaparte decreed the subversion of feudalism, thus abolishing baronial jurisdictions, feudal-like personal benefits, and prohibitory rights, i.e., monopolies on certain productive activities. Lands and property put into liquidation and opened for commercial exploitation by the French government were purchased by members of the new agrarian bourgeoisie, which was beginning to gain increasing political clout. This was accompanied by an administrative division of the Kingdom, which by decree of Dec. 8, 1806, was divided into districts and boroughs: Calabria retained the division of the two provinces of “Citeriore,” whose capital remained in Cosenza, and “Ulteriore,”” which instead had Monteleone assigned as its administrative seat in place of Catanzaro, both because of its relative ease of communication and military necessity. Both Calabrian provinces, presided over by an intendant, were divided into four districts, placed under the jurisdiction of their respective sub-districts, which in turn were divided into districts, each of which grouped a certain number of municipalities. In 1810 there was a dynastic change on the throne of Naples: instead of Joseph Bonaparte, placed by the emperor his brother to rule newly conquered Spain, Joachim Murat, Napoleon's brother-in-law as the husband of his sister Caroline Bonaparte, became king of Naples. The new king resumed with more vigor the process of social and economic modernization of his new kingdom: he profoundly reformed the tax system, replacing the Bourbon tax levies such as the testatico, the focatico and the tassa d'industria, with a single direct land tax that was levied on land ownership; from 1811 he initiated government inquiries to learn about the living conditions of rural populations, while in the economic sphere he showed an interest in the exploitation of mineral resources, as in the case of the mines connected to the Mongiana ironworks in the Serre.
The period of Napoleonic rule ended in 1815, after the fall of Napoleon following the defeat at Waterloo, which saw the return of the deposed Bourbon ruler to the throne, despite Murat's attempt in October of the same year to regain the throne with a small military expedition, which in his intentions was supposed to raise the whole of the continental Mezzogiorno. But the former king of Naples, having landed in Pizzo Calabro, was betrayed and captured by Bourbon troops: he was then sentenced to death by a military tribunal presided over by General Vito Nunziante and shot, on October 13, 1815, in the castle of the Calabrian town. Thus, having returned to the throne and consolidated his power, the Bourbon king initiated the administrative unification of the two kingdoms he ruled: in fact, with the law of December 16, 1816, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was born, of which Ferdinand was the first monarch with the name Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies.
The return of the Bourbons to the throne brought a period of absolute monarchical restoration, but it did not undermine the administrative reforms introduced by the French rulers, as these could be functional for a tighter control of the central government over the peripheral territories. On the contrary, they were increased and strengthened, as in the case of Calabria, which by royal decree of May 1, 1816, had two new administrative divisions: the province of Calabria Ulteriore Prima [it], with its capital in Reggio, and that of Calabria Ulteriore Seconda [it], with its headquarters in Catanzaro.
However, the monarchical absolutism of the sovereign generated a clear liberal opposition, formed by those bourgeois cadres of leaders who had prospered during French rule and who now saw themselves outclassed again by aristocratic and clerical exponents for reasons of social class. They were mainly army officers, but also bourgeois, intellectuals and civil servants, many of them adherents of the Carbonari sect, which was founded with the specific purpose of creating an Italy independent of foreign domination and forcing the various Italian sovereigns to grant a liberal constitution. Thus, on July 1, 1820, after the news of the granting in Spain of the Constitution of Cadiz, many Carbonari officers, including cavalry second lieutenants Giuseppe Silvati [it] and Michele Morelli [it] (the latter from Calabria), marched with their regiments from Nola to force Ferdinand I to grant the Constitution, gathering numerous supporters along the road to Naples. The ruler had to give in to popular pressure and grant the constitutional charter, but the liberal experiment was short-lived, as Austrian troops, secretly called to the rescue by Ferdinand himself, crushed the Neapolitan Carbonari uprisings. The main leaders of the revolutionary uprising, Morelli and Silvati, were sentenced to death and hanged in September 1822.
After the death of Ferdinand I in 1825 and the brief reign of his son Francis I, the 20-year-old Ferdinand II, son of Francis I, ascended the throne in 1830; after granting some partial economic and administrative reforms (cutting the civil list, abolishing some unnecessary court expenses, reducing ministers' salaries, recalling former Murattian officers into the army, reorganizing the army), the new ruler, however, did not grant those political and institutional reforms so eagerly awaited by the liberals, instead propping up the police regime established by his predecessors and crushing any hint of political revolt. However, unlike his father and grandfather, Ferdinand II was aware of the conditions in the outlying provinces of his kingdom and therefore decided to make several official trips to visit them: the first of these began on April 7, 1833, when the king, departing from Naples, arrived in Calabria, after passing through Sala Consilina and Lagonegro. On April 11 he was in Castrovillari, passed quickly through Cosenza and Monteleone, visited Tropea, Nicotera, Bagnara and Reggio Calabria, from where he embarked for Messina. After a few days King Ferdinand II returned to Bagnara and then went to visit the Mongiana ironworks; on April 23 he stopped in Catanzaro, then traveled along the Ionian coast and went to Taranto and Lecce, traveled through Capitanata, the Principato Ultra [it] and finally returned to the capital on May 6. During his visit the Bourbon ruler did many useful things: he granted pardons, decreed bridges and roads, corrected some arbitrary actions of public administrators and bestowed substantial relief to earthquake victims who had lost everything in the March 8, 1832 earthquake that occurred in the Crati and Coraci basin.
In the years that followed, before the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848, Calabria was the scene of numerous insurrectional uprisings of the liberal and Mazzinian kind, all of which were suppressed by the Bourbon regime. The protagonists were both patriots from other parts of Italy, such as the Venetian Bandiera brothers, who had arrived in 1844 to lend support to the aborted Cosenza revolt, only to be betrayed by one of their comrades and captured by the Bourbon gendarmerie, which shot them in August of that year in Rovito after a summary trial, and Calabrians such as the Five Martyrs of Gerace [it] (Michele Bello [it], Pietro Mazzoni [it], Gaetano Ruffo [it], Domenico Salvadori [it] and Rocco Verduci), who in 1847 tried to make the Gerace district rise up as part of the Mazzinian uprising in Reggio Calabria and Messina on Sept. 2, 1847, being shot after the suppression of the liberal uprising.
When King Ferdinand II was forced to grant a liberal constitution in January 1848 after numerous popular demonstrations to that effect, many southern liberals viewed the change of government with sincere interest, so much so that many of them were elected in the April parliamentary elections. But the ruler had no plans to abide by the constitutional charter: on May 5, 1848, in a coup d'état, he dissolved Parliament and also had Naples, which had rebelled, bombed, causing more than 1,000 deaths among the commoners. At this news, insurrectional committees arose in Calabria to resist Bourbon repression, the most organized of which were from Cosenza and Catanzaro, which called together arms, funds and volunteers to resist the Bourbon army. Despite their efforts, because of divisions over how to conduct military operations, the Calabrian insurgents in June were dispersed by the arrival of 5,000 Bourbon soldiers under the command of Generals Nunziante and Busacca. After the defeat, political repression followed, manifested in death sentences or life in prison (some in absentia) of the major leaders of the uprisings.
This caused the final rift between the Bourbon monarchy and the liberal bourgeoisie, stricken and decimated by arrests and persecutions, which would soon join the Italian unified cause. And it was counting on this connection that Giuseppe Garibaldi would manage to land on the Calabrian coast, at Melito di Porto Salvo, on August 19, 1860, after conquering Sicily. Backing the Garibaldi volunteers would be the Calabrian insurgents led by Agostino Plutino [it] from Reggio, thanks to whom, on August 21, with the Battle of Piazza Duomo [it], he managed to conquer the city of Reggio Calabria. Then, after managing to disarm as many as 12,000 of Colonel Vial's men at Soveria Mannelli, Garibaldi's army marched on Naples, where Garibaldi entered on September 6, triumphantly welcomed by the population. Finally, after the victorious Battle of the Volturno (Sept. 26-Oct. 2, 1860), by which the Bourbon reconquest of Naples was averted, the Meeting of Teano [it] between Garibaldi and King Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy took place on Oct. 26, 1860, and after issuing a proclamation to his new southern subjects, he had the Mezzogiorno annexed to his crown.
On 19 August 1860, Calabria was invaded from Sicily by Giuseppe Garibaldi and his Redshirts as part of the Expedition of the Thousand. Through King Francesco II of Naples had dispatched 16,000 soldiers to stop the Redshirts, who numbered about 3,500, after a token battle at Reggio Calabria won by the Redshirts, all resistance ceased and Garibaldi was welcomed as a liberator from the oppressive rule of the Bourbons wherever he went in Calabria. Calabria together with the rest of the Kingdom of Naples was incorporated in 1861 into the Kingdom of Italy. Garibaldi planned to complete the Risorgimento by invading Rome, still ruled by the pope protected by a French garrison, and began with semi-official encouragement to raise an army. Subsequently, King Victor Emmanuel II decided the possibility of war with France was too dangerous, and on 29 August 1862 Garibaldi's base in the Calabrian town of Aspromonte was attacked by the Regio Esercito. The Battle of Aspromonte ended with the Redshirts defeated with several being executed after surrendering while Garibaldi was badly wounded.
With the plebiscite of October 21, 1860, Calabria, along with the other southern provinces, became part of the Kingdom of Sardinia: consequently, new political elections were called to allow the newly annexed territories to have representation in Parliament. The round of elections was held on January 27, 1861, while the new Parliament was inaugurated in Turin on February 18 of the same year: the first and most important measure of the new assembly was the founding of the new Kingdom of Italy, proclaimed on March 17, 1861 with Victor Emmanuel II as constitutional king. However, the way of voting between the plebiscite and the parliamentary elections was very different: in fact, if in 1860 all male citizens who were at least 21 years of age and in possession of civil rights had been able to vote, the next round of elections was governed by the Piedmontese electoral law, which was census-based and provided for voting only for male citizens who were at least 25 years of age, able to read and write and who paid at least 40 liras in taxes. This allowed, thanks to a very narrow electorate, many members of the aristocratic and upper middle class, to which many Calabrian patriots also belonged, such as Francesco Stocco [it]and the brothers Antonino Plutino [it] and Agostino Plutino [it], who militated in the major political groupings of the time: the historical Right, of liberal and conservative tendencies, and the historical Left, of progressive and democratic ideas.
The political clash between Right and Left was focused particularly on how to complete the Unification of Italy, which still lacked Venice and Rome: the moderates wanted national completion through diplomatic agreements and the mediation of France, the country's historical ally, while the Democrats were more inclined to armed interventions by the Italian army to liberate those territories with the consent of the local populations. This diversity of views can find a tangible depiction in 1862, when the Battle of Aspromonte took place, that is, Giuseppe Garibaldi's attempt to repeat the Expedition of the Thousand, starting from Sicily and moving toward Rome to take it away from the pope and hand it over to the Kingdom of Italy. Urbano Rattazzi, head of the historical Left, who had become after Cavour's death the most influential politician in the Kingdom, as he enjoyed the confidence of the sovereign, was in government at that time. When Garibaldi went to Sicily in the summer of 1862, enthusiastically welcomed by the population, the government basically let it slide, perhaps knowing of his real intentions to liberate Rome; when, however, Napoleon III, a great protector of Pope Pius IX, threatened to send a French expeditionary force to defend the temporal power of the Church, then both King Victor Emmanuel II and Rattazzi ran for cover: the monarch issued a proclamation disavowing the Garibaldians' action, while the government mobilized the army to stop the general. After landing on August 25, 1862, at Melito di Porto Salvo at the head of 3,000 men, Garibaldi was met with gunfire from a military unit that had come out of Reggio: so the Garibaldini fell back to the mountainous massif of Aspromonte, where they marched for three days, encamping near Gambarie, in the territory of Sant'Eufemia d'Aspromonte. Here, on August 29, Garibaldi's volunteers were attacked by a military column commanded by Colonel Emilio Pallavicini [it]: after a brief firefight in which there were casualties on both sides (7 dead and 20 wounded for the Garibaldini, 5 dead and 23 wounded for the regular soldiers), Garibaldi, who wanted to avoid the clash, ordered a cease-fire. Also wounded in the left ankle bone, he surrendered to Pallavicini, who had him transported to Scilla and then to Paola, where he was embarked on a military ship, the pirofregata Duca di Genova [it], and transported to La Spezia, where he was imprisoned in the Varignano fortress. Although he was later amnestied, the affair caused a political earthquake in Italy, culminating in Rattazzi's resignation as head of government and accusations against the King that he had deluded Garibaldi about the feasibility of carrying out the enterprise, only to abandon it when things got complicated.
In the early years of the new Kingdom, Calabria, too, was the scene of the post-unification brigandage, which, having always been endemic in the Mezzogiorno, was also connoted, in the transitional phase between the Bourbon and Italian kingdoms, by legitimist aspirations: in fact, local Bourbon legitimists and the government of Francis II of the Two Sicilies in exile in Rome, attempted to guide and coordinate the action of the various bands of brigands that raged in the South and that were especially hard on the exponents of the newly formed liberal regime (the “galantuomini”), often exponents of that agrarian bourgeoisie in search of social prestige that had always been invisible to the Bourbon dynasty. The Borjes Expedition [it], a Bourbon legitimist attempt to reconquer the Kingdom of Naples operated by José Borjes, a Catalan general distinguished in the Carlist wars in Spain who thought he would succeed by imitating Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo's Sanfedist expedition sixty years earlier, must therefore be framed in this light. After receiving reassurance that the local population would support his cause, Borjes departed from Malta and landed in Brancaleone on September 14, 1861 with only 21 men, almost all Spanish: his goal was to make contact with the bands of brigands and unite them into one large army to reconquer all of the Neapolitan territory. To this end, he joined the band of Ferdinando Mittiga [it], a brigand chief operating in the area under the command of 120 men, but disagreements soon arose, because the brigand wanted to assault the town of Platì and take revenge on the local liberals, against the opinion of Borjes, who eventually had to give in. The assault took place on September 17 and was unsuccessful, as the brigands and legitimists were repelled by the National Guards and a regular army unit. This failure soon led to a break in the collaboration between the two commanders: on October 20 Borjes left Calabria to go to Basilicata and join his forces with those of Carmine Crocco, thanks to whom he also achieved some partial successes, but did not achieve the final objective, as the brigand leader refused to turn his men into a regular army. Therefore, noting the failure of the plan, the Catalan general attempted to cross the border into the Papal States and travel to Rome to report to the Bourbon ruler, but he was captured in Tagliacozzo and immediately shot on December 8, 1861. The failure of Borjes' expedition, however, did not put an end to the phenomenon of brigandage, which continued in the Mezzogiorno with greater virulence: for this reason, the first Minghetti government on August 15, 1863 promulgated the Pica law [it], a regulation that, seeking to combat brigandage, suspended constitutional guarantees for the southern provinces, imposing a state of siege and entrusting captured brigands to the judgment of military tribunals, without the possibility of appeal or defense. As far as Calabria was concerned, the law was applied in the provinces of Calabria Citeriore and Calabria Ulteriore Seconda, while the Reggio area was exempted, as was the area around Naples and part of Apulia, as the situation in these territories was under control. The Pica law remained in force until December 31, 1865, and contributed to eradicating the phenomenon of banditry, albeit with repressive methods and without providing a substantial answer to the many social and economic problems of the southern territories.
An underlying issue was that of the latifundium, which was in the hands of a few landowners who represented the economic and political elite of the place, forming the backbone of the southern political class. This also explains the widespread illiteracy, which peaked in the Mezzogiorno, where 90 percent of the population could neither read nor write. Even the extension to the entire Kingdom of the Casati Law [it], which introduced for the first time compulsory schooling for a maximum of two years, did not produce the hoped-for effects: the municipalities had to provide for the construction and maintenance of school buildings, as well as the recruitment and payment of elementary teachers, which was impossible for many southern municipalities, which did not build schools because they often had negative budgets orlacked the political will to start an effective school education system, as local leaders feared its potential and social claims. The same was true for the next school reform, the Coppino Law [it] of 1877, which raised compulsory schooling to 9 years of age and granted low-interest loans to municipalities that built school buildings: southern municipalities, however, often did not get the work started, as they feared that the new school measure would make the peasant masses more aware of their rights, and thus local notables would lose their electoral clientele.
In national politics, there were numerous Calabrian politicians, often with a Risorgimento past behind them, who held important roles in the various Italian governments of that period: Giovanni Nicotera, participant of the Sapri Expedition [it] and comrade of Carlo Pisacane, minister of the interior in the governments of Agostino Depretis and Antonio Di Rudinì, who headed a Left political formation called the Pentarchy because it included the major leaders of the historical Left (Rudinì, Francesco Crispi, Giuseppe Zanardelli, Alfredo Baccarini [it] and Benedetto Cairoli), hostile to Depretis' transformist policies; Luigi Miceli, Mazzinian and Garibaldian, minister of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce in the third Cairoli government; Bernardino Grimaldi, minister of Finance in the first Crispi government and the first Giolitti government, culminated in the 1893 Banca Romana Scandal.
During the 1880s, the economic conditions of the Mezzogiorno worsened, and its agricultural economy was severely damaged by the customs war that began between Italy and France in 1889: in fact, to protect its fragile industrial fabric, the Italian government raised import duties on foreign goods, to which France responded by shutting down imports of Italian agricultural goods, sending many southern farms into ruin. This, combined with the severe economic repression of those years, stimulated the phenomenon of emigration, especially to America, a fact that, while it decreased the demand for labor, left entire regions and countries depopulated and deprived these territories of their best energies. A case in point is Castrovillari and its surrounding area, which in 1901 recorded a decrease of 7,190 people due to transoceanic emigration.
In the newly unified Kingdom of Italy, there were significant differences in level of economic development between the Nord (north) of Italy and the Mezzogiorno (the south of Italy). Calabria together with the rest of the Mezzogiorno was neglected under the Kingdom of Italy with the general feeling in Rome being that the region was hopelessly backward and poor. In the late 19th century about 70% of the population of the Mezzogiorno were illiterate as the government never invested in education for the south. Owing to the Roman Question, until 1903 the Roman Catholic Church had prohibited on the pain of excommunication Catholic men from voting in Italian elections (Italian women were not granted the right to vote until 1946). As the devoutly Catholic population of Calabria tended to boycott elections, the deputies who were elected from the region were the products of the clientistic system, representing the interests of the land-owning aristocracy. In common with the deputies from other regions of the Mezzogiorno, they voted against more money for education under the grounds that an educated population would demand changes that would threaten the power of the traditional elite. Owing to a weak state, society in Calabria came to be dominated in the late 19th century by an organized crime group known as 'Ndrangheta which, like the Mafia in Sicily and the Camorra in Campania, formed a "parallel state" that co-existed alongside the Italian state. Between 1901 and 1914 Calabrians began emigrating in large numbers, mostly for North America and South America, with the peak year being 1905 with 62,690.
On 28 December 1908, Calabria together with Sicily was devastated by an earthquake and then by a tsunami caused by the earthquake, causing about 80,000 deaths. Within hours of the disaster, ships of the British and Russian navies had arrived on the coast to assist the survivors, but it took the Regia Marina two days to send a relief expedition from Naples. The bumbling and ineffectual response of the Italian authorities to the disaster caused by feuding officials who did not wish to co-operate with each other contributed to the high death toll as it took weeks for aid to reach some villages and caused much resentment in Calabria. To offset widespread criticism that the northern-dominated government in Rome did not care about the people of Calabria, King Victor Emmanuel III personally took over the relief operation and toured the destroyed villages of Calabria, which won the House of Savoy a measure of popularity in the region. Most notably, after the king took charge of the relief efforts, the feuding between officials ceased and relief aid was delivered with considerably more efficiency, winning Victor Emmanuel the gratitude of the Calabrians.
The outbreak of World War I saw Calabria participate in Italy's war effort with the establishment of five brigades, the most famous of which was the Catanzaro Brigade [it], formed by two regiments (the 141st and 142nd) and composed almost exclusively of Calabrian soldiers, one of the military units most committed and exploited by the Royal Army in the war against Austria-Hungary. Framed in the Third Army under the command of the Duke of Aosta, the king's cousin, it participated in the Third Battle of the Isonzo, where, on Monte San Michele, between October 17 and 26, 1915, it lost almost half of its personnel (about 6,000 men). In addition, during the Strafexpedition of June 1916, the 141st Brigade Regiment lost 38 percent of its components, with 333 casualties.
In addition to being one of the most committed Italian military units decorated for valor during the conflict, the Catanzaro Brigade was also the first to trigger the only episode of open rebellion on the Italian front, which occurred in June 1917: the cause was the order to return immediately to the trenches despite the fact that the Calabrian soldiers had just been sent to the rear for a rest period. Many soldiers from some companies of the 142nd Regiment began a revolt against the officers, killing three of them along with four carabinieri. Having quelled the rebellion with the help of departments of cavalry, mobile artillery and carabinieri, the General Staff decided on the decimation of the Brigade, as a warning for possible uprisings: 28 soldiers were thus shot, while the survivors were sent back to the front line under armed escort. The Duke of Aosta, commanding general of the Brigade, sought the causes of the rebellion in the period of prolonged service on the Karst Plateau and the unequal treatment with other brigades, which enjoyed easier rest shifts; of a different opinion was the report of General Tettoni, commander of VII Army Corps, who blamed the origin of the uprising on socialist propaganda among the troops and newspaper reports of the recent defeat in Russia.
After the conclusion of the conflict with the armistice of Villa Giusti on November 3, 1918, the demobilization of the ex-combatants, mostly of peasant extraction, to whom, during the war, had been promised the allocation of land derived from the fractionation of large estates, began. The lack of political will in the implementation of this promise, together with creeping nationalistic tensions in the country due to the Fiume and Dalmatian question, generated in Italy a climate of resentment and social unrest, which turned into strikes, nationalistic anti-government demonstrations and occupations of uncultivated land by the peasants in revolt, often organized in leagues or federations of different political coloring. For these reasons, on Sept. 2, 1919, the Italian government, headed by Francesco Saverio Nitti, issued the Visocchi Decree [it] (named after the Minister of Agriculture, Achille Visocchi [it]), which gave prefects the power to temporarily assign uncultivated land for a period of four years to peasants formed in legally constituted leagues or agrarian bodies. A permit issued by a committee composed equally of peasant and landowner representatives, under prefectorial control, was required to obtain the land assignment, which also stipulated the duration of occupation and the rental price to be paid by the peasants to the landowner. However, seven months after the decree was passed, the land redistribution had very limited effects: it is estimated that only 27,000 hectares were allocated: many scholars have argued that the government measure was not intended to revive agricultural production, but rather to provide a pardon for the numerous occupations of uncultivated land by peasants. The Visocchi Decree was widely criticized by both conservatives and socialists: Arrigo Serpieri, later minister of agriculture in the Fascist period, judged the measure “one of the most infamous of the postwar period”, while socialist Filippo Turati deemed it too “timid”.
The 1920 parliamentary elections saw the affirmation of nationalist candidates, elected thanks to the decisive support of ex-combatants (Saraceni himself would be beaten in his Castrovillari constituency in favor of the candidate supported by veterans from the front), while the Italian Socialist Party, while becoming the country's leading political force with as many as 156 deputies in Parliament, found itself internally divided between the maximalist current, advocating anti-bourgeois revolution, and the reformist current, in favor of dialogue with the government to push forward social reforms. This irreconcilable opposition led first to the expulsion of the reformists, such as Turati and Bissolati (who would go on to found the Unitary Socialist Party), then to the split that took place at the Livorno Congress in 1921, a fact that led to the birth of the Communist Party of Italy (which later evolved into the Italian Communist Party). In the same year the National Fascist Party was officially founded by Benito Mussolini, a former socialist expelled from the party for his interventionist positions on the eve of World War I, from an evolution of the earlier Fasci di Combattimento, founded in Milan in 1919 on the basis of an initially revolutionary and nationalist program. The aversion to socialism took concrete form in the assault by the fascist squads, the armed wing of the movement, on newspapers, cooperatives and party headquarters, whose exponents were truncheoned and forced to drink a strong purgative, castor oil. The squadrism was immediately financed by the large industrial groups and agrarians, fearful of a possible Bolshevik revolution in Italy, in the wake of the so-called biennio rosso, and was often not countered by the police, who on more than one occasion sided with the fascists.
In Calabria, too, the actions of fascist squads left their mark: on September 21, 1922, in Casignana, a small town in Aspromonte, carabinieri and fascists opened fire on laborers from the “Garibaldi” agricultural cooperative, who had organized an occupation of land owned by the prince of Roccella, killing the socialist alderman Pasquale Micchia and two peasants, Rosario Conturno and Girolamo Panetta, while the mayor Francesco Ceravolo was seriously wounded; this massacre ended the occupation. Subsequently, on October 4, 1922, at the inauguration of the Casignana Fascio, which was also attended by Giuseppe Bottai, shots were fired, while a rifle shot wounded a fascist who was part of his entourage in the arm. In retaliation, the squadrists ravaged the house of the president of the “Garibaldi” cooperative, while the Carabinieri arrested a dozen antifascists. These events freely inspired writer Mario La Cava [it] for his novel, The Facts of Casignana.
The penetration of fascism into Calabrian society was similar to that which took place in the rest of the country: in the city areas, the promoters of the fasces were the merchants and industrialists, who procured the support of the forces of law and order for the squadracce; in the rural areas, on the other hand, the backbone of fascism was represented by the large landowners and village notables, who decided to join the new party in order to weaken the “red” organizations and to maintain their socioeconomic position.
After fascism came to power with the March on Rome on Oct. 28, 1922, the establishment of a centralized dictatorial regime began in the southern region as well, strengthened after the assassination of socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 and concretized with the “Leggi fascistissime” of 1925-1926, which outlawed political parties except for the fascist party, censored the press, and banned trade union organizations and strikes. In addition, administratively, the electivity of municipal mayors was abolished, replaced by podestà, appointed directly by the prefect, with absolute powers in the political and economic management of the municipality.
During this period, the most representative Calabrian political personality was Michele Bianchi, a native of Belmonte Calabro, who was a close associate of Mussolini and quadrumviral of the 1922 March on Rome, in addition to holding the posts of deputy, undersecretary at the Ministry of the Interior and, finally, minister of Public Works. In this capacity, which he held until his death in 1930, he had a number of infrastructures built in Calabria, such as the Camigliatello Silano ski resort (initially called Camigliatello Bianchi), as well as promoting public works in Cosenza during the period when Tommaso Arnoni [it] was mayor (1925-1934).
In December 1924 when a false rumor spread in Reggio Calabria that Benito Mussolini had resigned as Prime Minister because of the Matteotti affair, joyous celebrations took place in the city that lasted all night. In the morning, the people of Reggio Calabria learned that Mussolini was still prime minister, but several Fascist officials were dismissed for not suppressing the celebrations. The landed aristocracy and gentry of Calabria, through generally not ideologically committed to Fascism, saw the Fascist regime as a force for order and social stability, and supported the dictatorship. Likewise, the prefects and the policemen of Calabria were conservatives who saw themselves as serving King Victor Emmanuel III first and Mussolini second, but supported Fascism as preferable to Socialism and Communism and persecuted anti-Fascists. Traditional elites in Calabria joined the Fascist Party to pursue their own interests, and local branches of Fascist Party were characterized by much jostling for power and influence between elite families.
In spite of this, conditions in Calabria under the Fascist regime had not improved, as evidenced by the surveys conducted by meridionalists (and antifascists) Umberto Zanotti Bianco and Manlio Rossi Doria [it] in 1928 and reported in the work Tra la perduta gente [it], where they analyze the social and economic conditions of Africo, a small village in Aspromonte: nestled on houses ruined by the previous 1908 earthquake and geographically isolated, it was plagued by disease, high infant mortality and indiscriminate taxation, lacking a doctor and school (classes were held in the teacher's bedroom), while the inhabitants ate bread made from lentils and chickpeas.
Despite the government's desire to maintain the “rural” character of the country, with the introduction of restrictions and disincentives to peasants and laborers to move to the city, urban areas also experienced development, as demonstrated by the Grande Reggio [it] project, that is, the idea of urban expansion and amalgamation strongly desired by the first Reggio podestà, Giuseppe Genoese Zerbi [it], who succeeded in obtaining the merger to the city on the Strait of as many as fourteen neighboring municipalities and suburbs, such as Catona, Gallico, Ortì [it], Podàrgoni, Mosorrofa [it], Gallina, Pellaro, Cannitello [it], Villa San Giovanni, Campo Calabro, and Fiumara; the last four, by government decree of January 26, 1933, broke away to form the municipality of Villa San Giovanni (Campo Calabro and Fiumara became autonomous again after the war). The urban population thus exceeded 100,000. The reasons for this conurbation were many: there was a desire to speed up the post-earthquake reconstruction that the war had blocked, to make trade and communication by sea easier because of the city's expansion along the coast, and to entice emigration from small mountain towns into a single large urban center. Moreover, between the 1920s and 1930s Reggio Calabria was modernized with the construction of new neighborhoods: in fact, social housing districts sprang up and several public facilities such as the new Reggio di Calabria Centrale railway station, the National Museum of Magna Graecia and the Francesco Cilea Municipal Theater [it] were built. Other cities also benefited from the building policy of the Fascist regime: in fact, through the work of Minister of Public Works Luigi Razza, the town of Monteleone di Calabria (renamed by royal decree Vibo Valentia, a name it still retains today), his place of origin, had a new municipal palace, inaugurated in 1935; after his death in the same year from a plane crash, his town paid tribute to him with a bronze statue, the work of sculptor Francesco Longo, inaugurated by the Duce himself in 1939. Vibo Valentia also named its military airport, stadium, a square and a street in the historic center after Luigi Razza.
As with the rest of Italy, Calabria's period of maximum support for fascism occurred with the Second Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935-1936, in which many Calabrians participated, thus providing momentary relief to the prevailing misery in the region with remittances from volunteers to their families. Many members of the Calabrian high clergy also supported the colonial war in Africa, marking the pinnacle of collaboration between Church and State in the aftermath of the Lateran Pacts of 1929: for example, the Archbishop of Reggio Calabria, Carmelo Pujia, already an interventionist on the eve of World War, had a prayer composed praising the glory of the homeland and the Italian flag.
Under the Fascist regime, several concentration camps were built in Calabria and used to imprison foreigners whose presence in Italy was considered undesirable, such as Chinese immigrants and foreign Jews (though not Italian Jews) together with members of the Romani minority, whose nomadic lifestyle was viewed as anti-social. The camps which operated from 1938 to 1943 were not death camps, and the majority of those imprisoned survived, but conditions were harsh for the imprisoned.
On June 10, 1940, with Italy's declaration of war on France and the United Kingdom, Calabria also found itself involved in the events of World War II: the civilian population suffered from the first period of the war from starvation and undernourishment, due to the lack of labor, low wages and the increase in basic necessities, which were already scarce and rationed, while other foodstuffs, such as meat and sugar, could only be found on the black market, at triple the price. This was also taken advantage of by the large landowners, who, taking advantage of the wartime period, ambushed part of the crops, which were destined for storage, later reselling them on the black market. Allied aerial bombardments also sapped the morale of civilians, sometimes even claiming some excellent victims: on January 31, 1943, the archbishop of Reggio Calabria, Enrico Montalbetti [it], died during an aerial machine-gunning operated by a British fighter-bomber while on a pastoral visit to Melito di Porto Salvo.
On 3 September 1943, British and Canadian troops of the British 8th Army landed in Calabria in Operation Baytown, marking the first time that the Allies landed on the mainland of Italy. However, the landings in Calabria were a feint and the main Allied blow came on 8 September 1943 with the landing of the American 5th Army at Salerno in Campania that was intended to cut off Axis forces in the Mezzogiorno. The Germans anticipated that the Allies would land at Salerno, and as a consequence, there was relatively little fighting in Calabria. The Italian troops in Calabria mostly surrendered to the advancing 5th British Division and the 1st Canadian Division while there were relatively few German forces in the region to oppose their advance. The main obstacle to the advancing Anglo-Canadian troops turned out to be the trail of destruction left by German combat engineers who systematically blew up bridges and destroyed roads and railroads as the Wehrmacht retreated north. On the same day the Americans landed at Salerno, General Dwight Eisenhower announced on the radio the Armistice of Cassibile that had been signed on 3 September, and with the announcement of the armistice all Italian resistance ceased. The Germans committed most of their forces in the Mezzogiorno to the Battle of Salerno with the aim of driving the Allies back into the sea and pulled their remaining forces out of Calabria to send them to Salerno. Under the Allied occupation, some Fascists in Calabria waged a terrorist struggle on behalf of the Salo republic, though significantly many of the Fascists tended to be from well-off families concerned about the possibility of social reforms that might weaken their power and only a minority such as Prince Valerio Pignatelli were ideological Fascists. In June 1944, celebrations in Reggio Calabria over the news of the liberation of Rome were disturbed by local Fascists.
Calabria liberated by the Allied troops was marked by a high economic depression, caused by an extremely backward agricultural sector, an industry in its “infantile state,” sparsely spread and crippled by the long and catastrophic conflict (the power plants in Sila were safe even if “the mass of electricity is partly transported elsewhere” as in the Fascist period), civil infrastructures, such as roads and aqueducts in themselves shoddy and insufficient, which had always connoted the backward degree of development and now appeared even more reduced and precarious due to the war outcomes. And finally, to seal the disaster, a territory completely disjointed by the violence anyway suffered, far from the front and yet battered first by Allied bombs and then by the destruction of the retreating Germans. The Allies themselves, faced with the gravity of the situation and general disorientation, were perplexed about the possibility of recovery. In a report to General Harold Alexander, the head of Civil Affairs of the Allied military government, the English Major General Francis Rennell Rodd, even fearing a resurgence of brigandage, manifested how difficult it was to “govern a discouraged and apathetic population,” with an “incompetent bureaucracy”. This misery spurred masses of the dispossessed into action, exacerbating social tensions and leading, with revolutionary effect, to the ultimate crisis of late-feudalism formed by reactionary classes clinging to parasitic rents that kept the land imprisoned and blocked its development.
The Allied military government worked to restart political and administrative life without, however, changing the scaffolding of the Fascist state. The crowds in front of town halls perhaps demanded only a “bureaucratic rip-off” of the bread card, a food support. The demonstrations, however, showed increasingly sharp and marked political thrusts. Increasingly they were led by communist and socialist agitators and expressed anti-fascist motives. Many times these demonstrations degraded into full-fledged riots, becoming violent and resulting in the deaths of several people. The first uprising in Calabria occurred on the morning of September 9 in Limbadi, which quickly turned the newly liberated town into a battlefield, but without causing any deaths. Like a wave, many of the towns liberated by the Anglo-American army rebelled against mayors and municipal secretaries. The best known is the November 4 insurrection in Cosenza, initially motivated by hunger and the housing crisis, which quickly turned into a political struggle to remove the Fascist mayor Enrico Hendrich [it], who was ousted by popular vote.
The fall of fascism and the landing of the Anglo-American army in Calabria also allowed the rebirth of a critical and conscious public opinion in the region, thanks in part to the coming out of hiding of the anti-fascist parties, such as the Italian Socialist Party, the Italian Communist Party and the Christian Democracy, a Catholic-inspired political organization founded in 1942 in semi-clandestinity and heir to Don Luigi Sturzo's Italian People's Party, each with its own newspapers and political headquarters.
All this had an impact on the socioeconomic conditions in the areas of Italy liberated by the Allied troops: the peasant masses, which made up about 60 percent of the Italian population, began, while still fighting the Nazi-Fascists in the center-north of the peninsula, to stage a series of violent uprisings in protest against their miserable living conditions and to demand the division of large land holdings, often giving way to large-scale occupations of uncultivated land, as had already happened after World War I. The peasant class reclaiming its rights was countered by the elite of agrarians and large landowners, who, at first staunch supporters of fascism, sought with the Allied advance to realign themselves according to the political dictates of the moment in order to maintain their economic and social privileges.
To cope with this social situation, in July 1944, a month after the liberation of Rome and the handover between Victor Emmanuel III of Savoy and his son Umberto II of Savoy, who obtained the Lieutenancy of the Kingdom, Calabrian Communist Fausto Gullo, formerly minister of Agriculture in the second Badoglio government and holder of the same department also in subsequent executives (second Bonomi government, third Bonomi government and Parri government), proposed a series of decrees (named after him) to improve the condition of the peasant class. Among the noteworthy decrees were: the reform of sharecropping, which was changed from annual to biennial; the granting of uncultivated land to individual peasants who had joined in agricultural cooperatives; compensation to farmers who took their produce to storage, which had previously been diverted to the black exchange; and the prohibition of the figure of the caporale, i.e., the day laborer recruiter. With these decrees, defined by historian Paul Ginsborg as “the only attempt made by leftist government officials to advance on the path of reform”, Gullo, who became the “Minister of the Peasants”, achieved two important results: the southern peasants' awareness of the state's non-stranger status to their problems and the realization by the laborers of their own strength if they acted united in cooperatives, in which all worked for the common goal. Thanks in part to cooperation with the trade unions, especially Giuseppe Di Vittorio's Italian General Confederation of Labour, Gullo's reform efforts were revived with two other decrees, concerning the taxable labor rate and placement lists: with the former, the trade unions were empowered to dictate the number of laborers who were to work a landowner's farmland, while with the latter, trade unionists could manage the placement of the men needed for laboring on the basis of seniority. With these measures they were at least able to avoid the war between the poor and make the union feel on the side of the peasants.
The provisions envisaged by the Gullo decrees were opposed by the agrarians, either by using the organized underworld or by enlisting the support of the more conservative currents of the Christian Democrats, who were frightened by the revolutionary repercussions of the government measures. Indeed, local Christian Democrats, often notables involved with the past regime, succeeded in getting the decrees amended with provisions that effectively made them unenforceable: in fact, agricultural cooperatives received uncultivated land from a special provincial commission, composed of the president of the Court of Appeals, a representative of the agrarians and one of the peasants, which often and willingly issued resolutions very favorable to the landowners; at other times, some decrees were declared illegal, such as the one on compensation to peasants, thanks in part to the submissiveness of the national Communist leadership, which did not want to radicalize the social clash so as not to invalidate the government alliance with the Christian Democrats.
The Communists thought of supporting revolutionary attempts that had their own origins in these social and economic demands, following instead the strategy of Secretary Palmiro Togliatti, who preferred a slow transaction toward democracy together with Christian Democrat leader Alcide De Gasperi to revolution. This was the case of the Red Republic of Caulonia, proclaimed on March 6, 1945, by Pasquale Cavallaro, mayor of Caulonia, a town where the clash between agrarians and laborers had been increasingly bitter since January 1944, when he had been appointed to the post by the prefect of Reggio Calabria, despite his communist faith, in place of Pasquale Saverio Asciutti, who was strongly colluding with fascism. In order to maintain public order, Mayor Cavallaro had empowered members of the local partisan section, commanded by his son Ercole Cavallaro, to go around armed with police and search duties. Not infrequently these searches ended in violence against the most prominent members of fascism and the agrarian class. During one such operation against two landowners, Ercole, with two comrades, was arrested by the Carabinieri on charges of theft. The mayor immediately did his utmost to obtain his son's release, causing the outbreak of the revolt: on March 5, 1945, Cavallaro's loyalists freed Ercole, closed the access roads to Caulonia, occupied the post office, the telegraph office and the Carabinieri barracks, while the following day, they hoisted the red flag with hammer and sickle on the bell tower, proclaiming the Republic. The Communist Party was immediately made aware of the event by telegram. Each had differentiated tasks: the partisan section took care of the armed defense of the territory, the women assisted the men with provisions, and the communist members had to keep in touch with the party federation. The revolutionaries also established a “People's Tribunal,” which was based in the town square and had the power to try “enemies of the people,” while an internment camp was also set up where many local agrarians and notables were locked up. The revolutionary experience worried both the conservatives and the communist leaders themselves, who pressed Cavallaro to calm tempers and end the flaring revolution: the mayor then became spokesman for the rebels and convinced almost all of them to return home and lay down their arms, although the most diehard refused to surrender and went into hiding. Finally, on March 9, 1945, after only three days, everything came to an end: the prefect of Reggio Calabria sent departments of carabinieri and police to Caulonia, who arrested 365 men, who were referred to the Locri court for constitution of an armed gang, murder, violence to private individuals and usurpation of public office, while on April 15, 1945 Cavallaro resigned as mayor.
The British historian Jonathan Dunnage wrote that there was an "institutional continuity" between the civil servants of the Liberal, Fascist and post-Fascist eras in Calabria as each change of regime saw the bureaucrats of the region adjust to whatever regime was in power in Rome and there was no purge of civil servants either after 1922 or 1943. The "institutional continuity" of the bureaucracy of Calabria were committed to preserving the social structure. On 2 June 1946 referendum Calabria, like the rest of the Mezzogiorno, voted solidly to retain the monarchy. The clientistic political system in Calabria under which elite families handed out patronage to their supporters and used violence against their opponents, which was the prevailing norm in the Liberal and Fascist eras continued after 1945. During the Second World War, the already low living standards of Calabria declined further and the region was notorious as one of the most violent and lawless areas of Italy.
Attempts by the peasants of Calabria to take over the land owned by the elite were usually resisted by the authorities. On 28 October 1949 in Melissa the police opened fire on peasants who had seized the land of a local baron, killing three men who were shot in the back as they attempted to flee. Between 1949 and 1966 another wave of migration took place with the peak year of migration being 1957 with some 38, 090 Calabrians leaving that year.
After the birth of the Italian Republic, the southern monarchist Enrico De Nicola became the provisional head of state, while De Gasperi regained the task of forming the government, becoming, with the entry into office on July 12, 1946 of the second De Gasperi government, the first Prime Minister of the Italian Republic. In the governmental structure, which still rested on the agreement between the major anti-fascist parties, the left-wing parties were strongly downsized in favor of the Christian Democrats, in view of the opposition between the two blocs (Western and Communist) typical of the Cold War. The Communists and Socialists went from 8 to 6 ministries, whose holders were chosen from among the Christian Democrats: as a result Mario Scelba, a Sicilian Christian Democrat, became Minister of the Interior, the Communist Emilio Sereni was Minister of Public Works, while Gullo, who had presided over the Agriculture ministry since 1943, was appointed Minister of Justice; in his place was the Christian Democrat Antonio Segni, a Sardinian landowner and future President of the Italian Republic, an exponent of the more conservative faction of the Christian Democracy.
Segni's appointment as Minister of Agriculture seemed to halt the agrarian reform drive that Gullo had imparted, especially in the South: the new minister, coming to meet the demands of the agrarian class, between September 1946 and December 1947 issued two decrees that allowed landowners to reclaim those lands that had not been improved or cultivated by peasants. While this secured the support of the southern elites for the Christian Democrat party on the one hand, enabling it to win the April 18, 1948 general elections, it only increased the tension between the two parties and restarted the occupation of uncultivated land by the laborers. The Massacre of Melissa [it], which took place in Calabria in the fall of 1949, fits into this context: on October 24 of that year, some 14,000 Calabrian peasants from the provinces of Catanzaro and Cosenza descended from their villages, accompanied also by women, children and work animals, to head for the large latifundia, occupy them and begin planting work. A group of Calabrian Christian Democracy parliamentarians from the agrarian class went to Rome, protesting and asking Interior Minister Mario Scelba to use force against the demonstrators. Scelba then sent units of the Mobile Units, mechanized riot police, to Calabria, which stopped at Melissa, in the province of Crotone, where there was a large number of protesters, camped out on the Fragalà estate, owned by local landowner Baron Luigi Berlingeri [it]. The fund, in fact, according to the subversion of feudality and the Napoleonic laws of 1811 was supposed to be assigned to the municipality, but the Berlingeri family had usurped it in its entirety over the years: now the peasants claimed at least half of it as municipal property, but the baron, as a sign of accommodation, was willing to cede only a third, resulting in a clear refusal. So it was that, on Oct. 29, 1949, police, after intimidating the crowd of peasants to clear out, fired at eye level, resulting in 15 wounded and 3 dead: 15-year-old Giovanni Zito, 29-year-old Francesco Nigro, and 23-year-old Angelina Mauro, who died later in the hospital.
This massacre, combined with that of Portella della Ginestra, in Sicily, which took place on May 1, 1947, provoked a series of strikes and peasant demonstrations throughout Italy, repressed by the police. The continuing state of unrest, however, induced De Gasperi to pass the first agrarian reform measures, which, however, did not result in an overall reform, but in individual laws valid for specific territories: therefore, on May 12, 1950, the Sila Law was passed, which initially concerned the territory located in the eastern Sila, and provided for the expropriation of latifundia exceeding 300 hectares, lacking improvements or reclamation. These two clauses provided a legal loophole for the agrarians who did not want to lose their estates, as they could subdivide the latifundia among relatives or plant temporary improvements on them. In addition to this, the geographical area to be expropriated was predominantly mountainous and forested, and therefore unsuitable for cultivation. A real agrarian law valid for the whole country, partly financed by funds from the Marshall Plan, was passed on October 21, 1950, with most of the conservative Christian Democracy current abstaining or voting against, supported also by conservative members of Harry Truman's administration. The reform, which according to some scholars was the most important of the entire post-World War II period, proposed, through forced expropriation, the redistribution of land to farmworkers, thus making them de facto small businessmen no longer subject to the large landowner. While this was a beneficial result, it also greatly reduced the size of farms, thus removing any possibility of transforming them into advanced entrepreneurial vehicles. However, this negative element was mitigated and in some cases eliminated by forms of cooperation: in fact, agricultural cooperatives arose which, by scheduling production and centralizing the sale of products, gave agriculture the entrepreneurial character that had been lost with the division of land. Thus there was a better yield of crops, which from extensive became intensive and thus a better exploitation of the land used. Agricultural labor, which until then had been unprofitable though very heavy, began to bear fruit. However, as a result of the development of industry, agriculture ended up becoming a marginal sector of the economy, but as a result of the development of modern cultivation techniques, it saw the income produced per hectare cultivated and thus the profitability of labor multiply.
In addition to this, the fourth De Gasperi government had established by Law No. 646 of August 10, 1950, the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, a public body created for the purpose of financing the infrastructural and industrial development of southern Italy in order to bridge the economic gap with the rest of the country, originally over a 10-year period (until 1960), although the Cassa was refinanced with public funds until its total liquidation by law in 1992. One of the planning instruments used for the finalization of interventions was the A.S.I. plan, or a plan for the creation of Industrial Development Areas: it provided for the establishment of consortia, carried out under Law No. 634 of July 29, 1957 (called “Provvedimenti per il Mezzogiorno”), in the type of sectoral plan, promoted by entities such as municipalities, provinces and chambers of commerce for the initiation of industrial development and the construction of basic infrastructure in the areas involved in the action of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno.
The outcome of the Cassa was by no means questionable in terms of the use of public capital, considering the backwardness of southern Italy in 1950 compared to the rest of the country in terms of infrastructure resources and per capita income: in Calabria, for example, important works were the doubling of 212 km of the Battipaglia-Reggio Calabria railway line (completed in 1965). However, subsequently the politicization of the agency's apparatuses led to a degradation and low quality of public spending, including widespread phenomena of illegality (such as financing entrepreneurs through contracts in order to develop enterprises in the Mezzogiorno, which later turned out to be “ghost” companies). Therefore, often huge procurements and other state initiatives ended up creating huge infrastructures that would not find practical application, either because they were alien to the economic realities of the South, or because they remained unfinished: therefore, this type of infrastructure was referred to as a cathedral in the desert.
The 1950s and 1960s were known as the period of the “economic miracle”: a short but intense period of time characterized by industrial development, economic growth, and an increase in consumption. It was during that period that Italian industry, thanks to the modernization of its industrial apparatus, achieved through the purchase and use of American technological skills and equipment financed by the Marshall Plan, achieved a remarkable rate of growth in production, so much so that in one decade it increased by up to 10 percent, leading to the economic and social transformation of Italy, which was transforming from a predominantly agricultural country into an industrial one. Those who benefited most were the large industrial complexes in northern Italy, which obtained most of the U.S. funding, while small and medium-sized enterprises, although they could not count on programmed interventions, also managed to emerge, thanks to their flexibility and ability to adapt to the market. In addition, the construction of roads and highways made the movement of people and goods faster, favored the production and employment of vehicles the various employment sectors, and profoundly affected the lifestyle of the population.
Growth and prosperity, however, did not spread evenly across the country, and did not affect all social strata and all productive sectors of the economy. We need only think of the crisis in the agricultural sector, which led to the substantial failure of the 1950 land reform in many parts of the South, due to the exponential growth of the role of industry in the Italian economy; in fact, between 1951 and 1991, workers employed in agriculture fell from 8,261,000 to 1,629,000, and in particular, those employed in the sector under 30 years of age plummeted from 3,299,000 in 1951 to 341,000 in 1991. However, this was also due to the process of mechanization of agriculture, which between 1954 and 1964 produced a contraction of the agricultural labor force in rural areas (from 8 million to 5 million).
Such was the situation in Calabria, where there had also been an increase in population in a land that offered no employment outlets or opportunities for survival, a factor that fostered a strong emigration of labor from the region after the forced blockade during the years of the fascist regime. The causes of the increased flow of migration were many and stemmed from numerous shortcomings: the unstable hydrogeology of the land, the lack of infrastructure works, the inclemency of the climate and, above all, the very high unemployment and underemployment prevailing in the Calabrian labor scene. The Parliamentary Commission for the Study of Misery certified this state of affairs: in fact, the inquiry showed that 179,500 Calabrians (37.7 percent of the region's total population) lived in a state of misery. It was the highest percentage in the entire country, compared to 1.5 percent in the North, 5.9 percent in the Center and the Mezzogiorno itself, where the percentage of misery was around 28.3 percent.
In the decade between 1951 and 1961 as many as 400,000 Calabrians emigrated to seek their fortune elsewhere, especially to America (such as Canada or the United States) or to the industrial cities of Northern Italy, especially those concentrated in the industrial triangle, which saw their population increase considerably, especially Turin (+42.6 percent) and Milan (+24.1 percent). In addition to this outward trend, Calabrian emigration also had an interregional one, that is, of people moving from inland areas, often mountainous and hilly, to settle in coastal centers, which were better connected and closer to the main arteries of communication, where there were more job opportunities in construction, urban services and commercial activities. This resulted in the complete abandonment of inland rural areas, with hydrogeological effects that are still felt today, while the ancient mountain and hillside villages lost autonomy and identity, falling into an irreversible crisis. One example is the ancient medieval village of Badolato Superiore, near Soverato, which has become, according to anthropologist Vito Teti, the “metaphor of the abandonment, ruin, flight, and hope of all of Calabria, of the entire Mezzogiorno”.
Under the First Republic, starting in the 1960s, investment plans were launched under which Italian state sponsored industrialisation and attempted to improve the infrastructure of Calabria by building modern roads, railroads, ports, etc. The plan was a notable failure with the infrastructure projects going wildly over-budget and taking far longer to complete then scheduled; for an example, construction started on the A3 highway in 1964 intended to link Reggio Calabria to Salerno, which was as of 2016 still unfinished. The failure to complete the A3 highway after 52 years of effort is regarded as a scandal in Italy, and many parts of Calabria were described as an "industrial graveyard" full of the closed down steel mills and chemical plants that all went bankrupt.
The Calabrian political landscape of that period was marked by the debate on the establishment of the regional entity and the choice of the capital, due not only to terms of prestige, but also to concrete job opportunities in the public and clerical sectors in a part of the peninsula where labor shortages and emigration were on the rise. Local Calabrian contrasts and rivalries were also reflected at the national level, when, in 1963, in the first Moro government, ministers and undersecretaries from Reggio Calabria and Catanzaro were excluded from the executive: the only Calabrians with institutional appointments were the Socialist Giacomo Mancini (who became Minister of Health) and the Christian Democrat Riccardo Misasi (holder of the Ministry of Grace and Justice), both originally from Cosenza. In addition, economically there were also numerous frictions between Cosenza, Catanzaro and Reggio Calabria, among other demographically diverse areas. On March 21, 1968, the Reggio Calabria City Council, which was considering the law establishing the region, voted on an agenda declaring that the city on the Strait should be the regional capital. Thus, to preserve city interests, the “Agitation Committee for the Defense of Reggio's Interests,” headed by Christian Democrat lawyer Francesco Gangemi [it], was born. However, the law establishing the Regions, which came into effect in 1970, confirmed the 1949 decision by which the parliamentary investigation committee appointed by the House Institutional Affairs Committee, with the delivery of the report called “Donatini-Molinaroli,” determined that, based on historical and geopolitical parameters, Catanzaro was the capital of the Calabria Region.
This situation, which reverberated in the local and regional elections, in which the minor secular leftist parties (social democrats and republicans) elected their first representatives, mainly in the provinces of Reggio and Cosenza, induced the city's mayor, Christian Democrat Pietro Battaglia [it], to give, on July 5, 1970, a heartfelt speech in Piazza Duomo in front of 7,000 people, to claim the city's just right to be the regional capital. On July 12, the prodrome of the uprising began in the city, with the creation of the first roadblocks and numerous public demonstrations, while, on the same day, in Villa San Giovanni, Senate President Amintore Fanfani, who had come to the city to collect an award, was harshly challenged by the crowd. In retaliation to Fanfani's indifference, the regional deputies from Reggio Calabria (5 Christian Democrats and 1 Socialist), deserted the regional council meeting scheduled for July 13, as opposed to the Communist representatives, who went instead.
Finally, on July 14, 1970, the actual uprising, which went down in history as the Reggio revolt, broke out, supported by all of the city's social classes (bourgeoisie, clergy, students, political parties, civic committees). On that day there were clashes between the demonstrators and the forces of law and order, which left one person dead, railroad worker Bruno Labate: this prompted the Archbishop of Reggio, Vincenzo Ferro, in September to join the showdown. The uprising was also supported by newspapers of liberal-conservative tendency (such as the Gazzetta del Sud and Il Tempo), and by various intellectuals, who asserted the city's political and social claims. Gradually the leadership of the protests passed from Mayor Battaglia, who did not want to go too far, to the far-right movements, particularly the Movimento Sociale Italiano, seen as the least compromised with the republican regime; soon the Missini imposed their authority on the uprising, including through various slogans (famous was the boia chi molla of D'Annunzian memory). Ciccio Franco, a CISNAL trade unionist and Reggio Calabria-based Missini exponent, emerged as the undisputed leader of the situation. At this point barricades were erected, the railway station was occupied and all convoys and ferries leaving for Sicily were blocked. In the first months of the uprising, moreover, there were 19 days of general strike, 12 bomb attacks, 32 roadblocks, 14 occupations of the station, 2 of the post office, 1 of the television station, and 4 assaults on the prefecture, with a death toll of 5 (in addition to Labate, Angelo Campanella, a driver for the city's municipal bus company, also perished in the clashes, Vincenzo Curigliano, a policeman struck by a heart attack during an assault on the Questura; Antonio Bellotti, a 19-year-old officer hit by a stone while leaving Reggio by train with his department; and Carmelo Jaconis, a bartender killed by a gunshot), 426 arrested and 200 wounded during the police charges (whose members were insulted and vilified even by hospital doctors). Even, in some parts of the city, “autonomous republics” were proclaimed, such as the “Republic of Sbarre” and the “Grand Duchy of St. Catherine,” a clear symptom of the prevailing anti-statism among the protesters. The Italian government, presided over by Emilio Colombo after the resignation of Mariano Rumor, after appealing to the people of Reggio Emilia urging them to appease, threatening, in the event of a continuation of the violence, the use of force, decided, for the first time in the history of the Italian Republic, to repress the street demonstrations and urban guerrilla warfare by having the army and carabinieri intervene. Even far-left parties, such as the Communists and the PSIUP, condemned the Reggio uprising, branding it as parochial and non-proletarian, often clashing with their own city voter base. Eventually, on February 23, 1971, after 10 months of rioting and agitation, the revolt ceased: the people of Reggio had to come to a political compromise with the government, which occurred, however, not in Parliament but in the regional council, where they had little political clout. The Prime Minister, meeting with the president of the Calabria Region, Christian Democrat Antonio Guarasci [it], and various regional politicians from various parties, worked out a compromise agreement, known as the Colombo Package [it], which sought to bring all parties together: Catanzaro would be the regional capital, while Reggio would host the seat of the regional council; Cosenza, on the other hand, would be the site of Calabria's first university hub (today's University of Calabria), while Gioia Tauro would be the fifth national steel hub and a massive chemical factory would be established in Saline Joniche. The agreement was accepted by the city's population, but the Gioia Tauro steel plant was never built, due to the international steel market crisis, while the Saline Joniche chemical plant, although built, ceased production almost immediately due to the Ministry of Health's provision that had declared the chemical feed supplements it produced to be carcinogenic.
The consequences of the Reggio uprising were reflected in electoral performance, when in the 1972 general elections the needle of the scales shifted in favor of the extreme right, which won 27 percent of the vote and became the leading party in the city, outperforming other political formations and electing Ciccio Franco to the Senate. In October of the same year, a two-day demonstration was organized in Reggio by some 40,000 northern metalworkers who were members of the CGIL, in solidarity with the inhabitants' reasons for revolt: the reactions of the latter were diverse, as some welcomed the gesture, while others ignored or opposed it, a sign of the distance between the southern and northern socioeconomic realities.
The Reggio revolt remain to this day one of the most controversial pages in the history of Calabria and even Italy, partly because of the lack or absence of related documentation, which is often destroyed or secreted. In order to understand this historical episode, one must refer to historiography, which denies or approves of certain views: it was not a parochial uprising, but complex political and social motivations converged behind it; it was not a fascist uprising, although the Italian Social Movement was at the head of it, as the leftists (especially the communists) said, since it was an interclass, inter-party and intergenerational movement, while it was instead an anti-state uprising (see the case of the “autonomous republics”), spontaneous and without direction behind it, despite Mayor Battaglia's call to strike. In addition to this, recent studies have found that there were also strong infiltrations of the 'ndrangheta, colluding with the extremist subversive right (see the case of the Baracca anarchists), in the uprising; therefore, there are those who believe that deviated sectors of the state and secret services were also involved in the uprising, so much so that the Reggio revolt can be ascribed to a part of the strategy of tension that gripped the country in those years.
In the 1980s, the social and economic situation in Calabria was anything but prosperous: as Piero Gagliardo, a professor at the University of Calabria, wrote, the region had no development plan of its own, was apparently abandoned to the various party clienteles, but was effectively run by power groups linked to organized crime and deviant freemasonry. As a result, in Calabria, which is made to play the role of the poorest and most depressed region in Italy, social and economic initiatives, even very significant ones, are undertaken with exasperating slowness, and often based on a human and territorial fabric that is not always suitable for receiving them. In fact, in the region, many works, including those of significant public expenditure, had been initiated, but more for the benefit of the entrepreneurial hundred in the center than for the real needs of the periphery. In addition to this socioeconomic analysis, Gagliardo notes the persistence of widespread electoral clientelism, which the electoral political class, instead of eliminating, wanted to nurture for its own personal gain.
Alongside this political, cultural and economic landscape, there was the gradual infiltration into the Calabrian social and economic fabric of the 'Ndrangheta, a criminal organization akin to the Mafia and Camorra, which began to make headlines thanks to the season of kidnappings of important hostages in order to demand a ransom to finance their criminal activities (such as the one of John Paul Getty III, grandson of an U.S. oilman, kidnapped in 1973 and released along the Autostrada A2 after the payment of a ransom of one billion seven hundred million lire). In the 1980s, the Calabrian 'ndrine turned instead to international narcotics trafficking, forging contacts with South American drug cartels and enacting numerous internal feuds among the various Mafia clans for control of territory and drug areas. As in Sicily, the 'ndrangheta in Calabria infiltrated into the local political fabric, not infrequently placing its own affiliates in key posts in municipal administrations in order to pilot and profit on public contracts. The case of the Gioia Tauro harbor, completed in 1985, which was conceived as a trading port for the never-planned steel center envisaged by the Colombo Package, and later used as a transit hub for containers transported by transoceanic ships plying the Mediterranean Sea, is well known: from the outset, the port facility was under the control of the Piromalli and Molè [it] clans, who used it to bring drugs and counterfeit goods into Italy. In the 1990s, in order to quell the criminal phenomenon, which was flanking the Mafia in its massacre phase against men of the state (an act that materialized in the 1991 murder of Judge Antonino Scopelliti, who was working on the Palermo Maxi Trial), Operation Riace [it] was implemented, where the army was employed, with a total of 1350 military personnel, while numerous maxiprocesses were subsequently carried out: “Wall Street,” ‘Count Down,’ ‘Hoca Tuca,’ ‘North-South,’ ‘Belgium,’ and ‘Fine,’ which involved many 'ndrine and the end of the Siderno Group, an underworld consortium between Canada and Calabria that ran international drug trafficking.
Yet, in the last years of the 20th century there have been some changes, partly due to volunteerism and to an awareness of a large part of the Calabrian people, increasingly participating in public affairs. One example is the election on November 28, 1993, of Italo Falcomatà as mayor of Reggio Calabria, who was reconfirmed for three terms until his untimely death on December 11, 2001. Falcomatà, at the head of a center-left junta, was the protagonist of the so-called “Springtime of Reggio,” or a period in which the first citizen spurred his fellow citizens to re-enamor themselves with the city, after years of torpor in public participation and social apathy. During his tenure, he succeeded in unlocking funds from the “Reggio Decree” that had been awaited for years for the redevelopment and development of the city on the Strait, while he tenaciously fought against illegal construction and downsized the open market, which, with its street stalls run by organized crime expanded without limits and permits and congested traffic.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Calabria is subdivided as follows: service industry (28.94%), financial activities and real estate (21.09%), trade, tourism, transportation and communication (19.39%), taxation (11.49%), manufacturing (8.77%), construction (6.19%) and agriculture (4.13%). GDP per capita is 2.34 times less and unemployment is 4 times higher than in Lombardy. Calabria's economy is still based mainly on agriculture.
The economy of the region is strongly affected by the presence of the 'Ndrangheta (the local Mafia syndicate).
Calabria is agriculturally rich, with the Italy's second highest number of organic farmers after Sicily.
The red onion of Tropea is cultivated during summer period on the Tyrrhenian coast of central Calabria. It has been awarded with the protected geographical indication (PGI).
The olive tree represents 29.6% of utilized agricultural area (UAA) and approximately 70% of tree crops. Olive tree cultivation extends from coastal lowland areas to hilly and lower mountainous areas. The region is the second-highest for olive oil production with Carolea, Ogliarola, and Saracena olives as the main regional varieties.
In Calabria, there are 3 PDO oils: "Bruzio" in the province of Cosenza, "Lametia" in the area of Lamezia Terme and the more recent "Alto Crotonese". In addition to DOP oils there are also PGI oils. The production area of "Olio di Calabria" PGI includes the entire territory of the Calabria region. The production is made exclusively from indigenous olives.
Calabria produces about a quarter of Italy's citrus fruit. The contribution of this region to growing citrus fruit in Italy can be attributed mainly to clementines, oranges, mandarins and lemons. Calabria is by far the country's most important clementine-growing region, which account for about 62% (16,164 ha) of the Italian surface dedicated to its cultivation and 69% (437,800 tons) of the total production. Clementina di Calabria is the PGI variety grown in the Calabria region. Also chinotto is cultivated and used to produce carbonated soft drink with the same name.
Minor fruits such as bergamot and citron and lemon-citron hybrids are found exclusively in Calabria. The south coast of the region produces 90% of the world's bergamots, with a huge industry built around the extraction of bergamot oil. According to Harvard Atlas of Economic Complexity, last year with Italian net export of bergamot oil was 2009 in value of $253,000, after that between 2010 and 2018 was no export of it. The Bergamot orange has been intensively cultivated since the 18th century, but only in the coastal area nearby to Reggio, where geological and weather conditions are optimal. The Chabad Hasidic dynasty have a preference to take citrons ("Etrog") from this region for the Sukkot festival.
There is special research Experimental Station for the Industry of the Essential oils and Citrus products in Reggio di Calabria.
The province of Cosenza represents an important area for figs growing belonging to cultivar "Dottato" that is used to produce the quality-branded dried figs "Fichi di Cosenza" PDO (protected designation of origin). The anona cherimoya, a plant of tropical origin cultivated in Europe only in Reggio di Calabria and Spain.
In the province of Catanzaro, between San Floro and Cortale, the ancient tradition of sericulture is still kept alive, thanks to young generations.
Calabria is the largest producer of porcini mushrooms in Italy, thanks to the heavily wooded forests of the mountains ranges of Pollino, Sila, Serre and Aspromonte. Chestnut production is also widespread in the Calabrian mountains. But not only porcini mushrooms, there is other popular red pine mushroom or rosito.
Peaches and nectarines from Calabria have greatly improved in terms of flavour, quality, safety and service. A part of the production is sold on the domestic market, mainly to retailers. The remaining is exported to Northern Europe, mainly Scandinavia and Germany.
The region boasts a very ancient tradition in the cultivation and production of liquorice. The eighty percent of the national production is concentrated in this region.
Calabria has long coast and produce some distinctive fish products:
Food and textile industries are the most developed and vibrant. Within the industrial sector, manufacturing contributes to a gross value added of 7.2%. In the manufacturing sector the main branches are foodstuff, beverage and tobacco with a contribution to the sector very close to the national average. Over the recent decades some petrochemical, engineering and chemical industries have emerged, within the areas of Crotone, Vibo Valentia and Reggio Calabria.
The province of Catanzaro boasts a great tradition in the textile manufacturing, especially silk. Recently, several young people have given new life to this activity, developing green and sustainable economy projects. In fact, among the municipalities of Girifalco, San Floro and Cortale, sericulture is still practiced, the breeding of silkworms combined with the cultivation of mulberry trees.
Tiriolo and Badolato are known above all for the manufacturing of the "vancale", the typical Calabrian shawl, made of wool or silk, worn by women in ancient times on traditional costumes during the dance of tarantella, or as an ornamental decoration of the houses. Typical in Tiriolo is also the manufacturing of carpets, linen and broom fibers, bobbin lace making, embroidery, precious ceramics, furnishing objects and artistic sculptures. The artistic production of weaving is also active in other centers such as in Platania and Petrizzi where once hemp fibers were also produced.
In Soveria Mannelli, Lanificio Leo, the oldest textile factory in Calabria founded in 1873, is still active. The factory still retains majestic and evocative tools dating back to the late nineteenth century.
The traditional production of artistic ceramics dating back to the Magna Graecia period is handed down in the ancient towns of Squillace and Seminara.
The small town of Serrastretta, a green village in the woods of Presila, is known for its wood production, in particular for its chairs characterized by a very original straw.
There is a plant of Hitachi Rail Italy in Reggio di Calabria, which manufactures railcars of regional trains such as Vivalto.
Tourism in Calabria has increased over the years. The main tourist attractions are the coastline and the mountains. The coastline alternates between rugged cliffs and sandy beaches, and is sparsely interrupted by development when compared to other European seaside destinations. The sea around Calabria is clear, and there is a good level of tourist accommodation. The poet Gabriele D'Annunzio called the coast facing Sicily near Reggio Calabria "... the most beautiful kilometer in Italy" (il più bel chilometro d'Italia). The primary mountain tourist draws are Aspromonte and La Sila, with its national park and lakes. Some other prominent destinations include:
Calabria attracts year-round tourism, offering both summer and winter activities, in addition to its cultural, historical, artistic heritage, it has an abundance of protected natural habitats and 'green' zones. The 485 mi (781 km) of its coast make Calabria a tourist destination during the summer. The low industrial development and the lack of major cities in much of its territory have allowed the maintenance of indigenous marine life.
The most sought-after seaside destinations are: Tropea, Pizzo Calabro, Capo Vaticano, Reggio Calabria, Soverato, Scilla, Scalea, Sellia Marina, Montepaone, Montauro, Copanello (comune of Staletti), Tonnara di Palmi, Diamante, Paola, Fiumefreddo Bruzio, Amantea, Praia a Mare, Belvedere Marittimo, Roseto Capo Spulico, Corigliano Calabro, Cirò Marina, Amendolara, Roccella Ionica, Bagnara Calabra, Nicotera, Cariati, Zambrone, Isola di Capo Rizzuto, Caminia (comune of Staletti), Siderno, Parghelia, Ricadi and San Nicola Arcella.
In addition to the coastal tourist destinations, the interior of Calabria is rich in history, traditions, art and culture. Cosenza is among the most important cultural cities of Calabria, with a rich historical and artistic patrimony. Medieval castles, towers, churches, monasteries and other French castles and structures from the Norman to the Aragonese periods are common elements in both the interior and coastline of Calabria.
The mountains offer skiing and other winter activities: Sila, Pollino and Aspromonte are three national parks that offer facilities for winter sports, especially in the towns of Camigliatello (comune of Spezzano della Sila), Lorica (comune of San Giovanni in Fiore), Gambarie.
Calabria has many small and picturesque villages, 15 of them have been selected by I Borghi più belli d'Italia (English: The most beautiful Villages of Italy), a non-profit private association of small Italian towns of strong historical and artistic interest, that was founded on the initiative of the Tourism Council of the National Association of Italian Municipalities.
The unemployment rate stood at 20.1% in 2020 and was the highest in Italy and one of the highest inside the European Union.
The region is served by three heavily used roads: two national highways along the coasts (the SS18 between Naples and Reggio Calabria and the SS106 between Reggio Calabria and Taranto) and the A2 motorway, which links Salerno to Reggio Calabria, passing by Cosenza along the old inland route. Building this motorway took 55 years and was extremely over budget due to organized crime infiltration.
The main road infrastructures can be classified into two separate groups, the first including the road infrastructures that cross the whole of Calabria from north to south:
The second group includes the roads, which run through the region from the Tyrrhenian coast to the Ionian coast (west-east) .
There is high-speed rail on Calabria's Tyrrhenian Coast with the Frecciargento (Silver Arrow) offering a route from Rome to Reggio Calabria. There are also many ferries connecting Calabria with Sicily through the Strait of Sicily with the main one being from Villa San Giovanni to Messina.
The main Calabrian ports are in Gioia Tauro and in Reggio Calabria.
The port of Gioia Tauro has seven loading docks with an extension of 4,646 m (15,243 ft); it is the largest in Italy and the eighth largest container port in Europe, with a 2018 throughput of 4.0 million TEUs from more than 3,000 ships. In a 2006 report, Italian investigators estimated that 80% of Europe's cocaine arrived from Colombia via Gioia Tauro's docks. The port is also involved in the illegal arms trafficking. These activities are controlled by the 'Ndrangheta criminal syndicate.
The port of Reggio is equipped with five loading docks of a length of 1,530 m (5,020 ft).
Other ports:
Calabria has the two highest bridges in Italy:
Plans for a bridge linking Sicily to Calabria have been discussed since 1865. Throughout the last decade, plans were developed for a road and rail link to the mainland via what would be the world's longest suspension bridge, the Strait of Messina Bridge. Planning for the project has experienced several false starts over the past few decades. On 6 March 2009, Silvio Berlusconi's government declared that the construction works for the Messina Bridge would begin on 23 December 2009, and announced a pledge of €1.3 billion as a contribution to the bridge's total cost, estimated at €6.1 billion. The plan has been criticized by environmental associations and some local Sicilians and Calabrians, concerned with its environmental impact, economic sustainability and even possible infiltrations by organized crime.
The following is a list of Calabrian municipalities with a population of over 20,000:
Calabria is divided into five provinces:
Although the official national language of Calabria has been Standard Italian since before unification in 1861, Calabria has dialects that have been spoken in the region for centuries. The Calabrian language is a direct derivative of Latin. Most linguists divide the various dialects into two different language groups. In the northern area of the region, the Calabrian dialects are considered part of the Neapolitan language and are grouped as Northern Calabrian. In the rest of the region, the Calabrian dialects are often grouped as Central and Southern Calabrian, and are considered part of the Sicilian language. However, in Guardia Piemontese, as well as some quarters of Reggio Calabria, a variety of Occitan called Gardiol can also be found. In addition, since Calabria was once ruled by the French and Spanish, some Calabrian dialects exhibit Spanish and French influences. Another important linguistic minority, in the nine towns of Bovesìa in the province of Reggio Calabria, speaks a derivative of ancient Greek called Grecanico, a remnant of Byzantine rule and ancient Magna Graecia.
The majority of Calabrians are Roman Catholic. Historically, Calabrians were Greek Orthodox, and in 732 the dioceses of southern Italy were even moved to the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople. There are also communities of Evangelicals in the region. Calabria has also been called "The Land of Saints" as the region was the birthplace of many saints spanning nearly 2,000 years. The most famous saint in Calabria and also the patron saint of the region is St. Francis of Paola. Calabria also has another patron saint called Saint Bruno of Cologne who was the founder of the Carthusian Order. Saint Bruno would build the charterhouse of Serra San Bruno, a town which bears his name, in 1095 and later die there in 1101.
Even though it is currently a very small community, there has been a long history of the presence of Jews in Calabria. The Jews have had a presence in the region for at least 1600 years and possibly as much as 2300 years. Calabrian Jews have had notably influence on many areas of Jewish life and culture. Although virtually identical to the Jews of Sicily, the Jews of Calabria are considered a distinct Jewish population due to historical and geographic considerations. There is a small community of Italian Anusim who have resumed the Jewish faith.
It is important to highlight the presence of Calabrians in Renaissance humanism and in the Renaissance. Indeed, the Hellenistics in this period frequently came from Calabria maybe because of the Greek influence. The rediscovery of Ancient Greek was very difficult because this language had been almost forgotten. In this period the presence of Calabrian humanists or refugees from Constantinople was fundamental. The study of Ancient Greek, in this period, was mainly a work of two monks of the monastery of Seminara: Barlaam, bishop of Gerace, and his disciple, Leonzio Pilato. Leonzio Pilato, in particular, was a Calabrian born near Reggio Calabria. He was an important teacher of Ancient Greek and translator, and he helped Giovanni Boccaccio in the translations of Homer's works.
The cuisine is a typical southern Italian Mediterranean cuisine with a balance between meat-based dishes (pork, lamb, goat), vegetables (especially eggplant), and fish. Pasta (as in central Italy and the rest of southern Italy) is also very important in Calabria. In contrast to most other Italian regions, Calabrians have traditionally placed an emphasis on the preservation of their food and packing vegetables and meats in olive oil, and on making sausages and cold cuts (soppressata, 'nduja, capocollo). Along the coast fish is cured, especially swordfish, sardines (sardelle rosamarina) and cod (baccalà). Local desserts are typically fried, honey-sweetened pastries such as cudduraci, nacatole, scalille or scalidde, or baked biscotti-type treats such as nzudda.
Some local specialties include caciocavallo cheese, cipolla rossa di Tropea (red onion), frìttuli and curcùci (fried pork), liquorice (liquirizia), lagane e cicciari (a pasta dish with chickpeas), pecorino crotonese (sheep cheese), and pignolata.
In ancient times Calabria was referred to as Enotria (from Ancient Greek Οἰνωτρία, Oenotria, 'land of wine'). According to ancient Greek tradition, Οἴνωτρος (Oenotrus), the youngest of the sons of Lycaon, was the eponym of Oenotria. Some vineyards have origins dating back to the ancient Greek colonists. The best known DOC wines are Cirò (province of Crotone) and Donnici (province of Cosenza). 3% of the total annual production qualifies as DOC. Important grape varieties are the red Gaglioppo and white Greco. Many producers are resurrecting local, ancient grape varieties which have been around for as long as 3000 years.
The most popular sport in Calabria is football. In the 2023–24 Serie B season, Calabria hosts 2 out of 20 teams: Cosenza Calcio and Catanzaro. Other big teams of the region are Crotone and Vibonese, who are playing in the 2023–24 Serie C.
Viola Reggio Calabria is an Italian professional basketball club based in Reggio Calabria, Calabria.
There are 3 public universities in the region of Calabria
There is also the private University for Foreigners "Dante Alighieri" in Reggio Calabria.
The health service in Calabria is organized into four main public hospitals and thirty secondary ones, and there are numerous private hospital facilities. Because of their debts, since 2009 they were administered by an extraordinary commissioner. It has been seen as an unavoidable step to return to an ordinary and cost-effective administration at a regional level, as it is provided by the Italian Constitution.
The four main public hospitals are