The 6 best towns you can reach by train that eat well in Calabria

1. Tropea

Best for everyday life on foot. Nine of the ten everyday services we look for are mapped within 500 meters of the center.

1 h 28 min from Reggio Calabria · homes €1,400 to €1,700 a m² in the center · 5,706 people

Why visit Tropea

Tropea stands on a tufa cliff fifty meters above the Tyrrhenian Sea, on the stretch of Calabria's west coast marketed as the Costa degli Dei. The town has been a port since Roman times and a bishop's seat since at least the seventh century, with Norman and Aragonese phases visible in its walls and palazzi.

The Cattedrale di Maria Santissima di Romania was built by the Normans in the twelfth century; it holds the Crocifisso Nero from around 1600 and the Byzantine-style icon of the Madonna di Romania, the town's patron. The Santuario di Santa Maria dell'Isola, first a refuge for Byzantine hermits in the early Middle Ages, sits on a sandstone outcrop thirty-three meters above the sea, reached by a staircase cut around 1810.

The cipolla rossa di Tropea PGI, said to have been introduced by the Phoenicians and noted by Aristotle and Strabo, grows on the volcanic soils just inland. Tropea was named Borgo dei Borghi 2021 by RAI.

De' Minimi is listed in the MICHELIN Guide and Gambero Rosso.

What to see in Tropea

• Santuario di Santa Maria dell'Isola. Early medieval church on a sandstone sea rock thirty-three meters above the water, Benedictine from the eleventh century, reached by a staircase cut into the cliff.
• Cattedrale di Maria Santissima di Romania. Twelfth-century Norman cathedral of tufa and lava stone, with the Crocifisso Nero from around 1600 and the Byzantine-style icon of the Madonna di Romania.
• Centro storico sulla rupe. Tufa cliff town fifty meters above the sea, with noble palazzi from the Norman to Aragonese periods along Corso Vittorio Emanuele.

How to get to Tropea

It has its own railway station. Reggio Calabria is about 1 h 28 min away by road.

Everything we know about Tropea

2. Soverato

Best for a swim. The comune's beach holds a Blue Flag.

1 h 50 min from Reggio Calabria · homes €1,550 to €1,900 a m² in the center · 8,496 people

Why visit Soverato

Soverato sits in the province of Catanzaro, on the narrow waist where Calabria almost touches itself, its coast facing the Ionian. The modern town runs along the shore, while uphill lies Soverato Superiore, rebuilt after the 1783 earthquake destroyed the old village whose ruins stand on a nearby hill; its Duomo of the Addolorata, built after the quake, marks that upper core, separate from the seafront strip that draws the summer crowds.

Statistical surveys describe Soverato as the highest per-capita income commune in Calabria, and the town has drawn tourists since the mid-2010s, its medical services, schools and long bathing season making it the regional anchor for the coast between Catanzaro and Locri. The wealth and the tourism trace back to the same geography: a beach town that grew rich enough to become the service center for the stretch of coast around it, while its older self stayed on the hill above.

Brezza fish and chill is listed in the MICHELIN Guide and Gambero Rosso.

What to see in Soverato

• Spiaggia di Soverato. The beach carries both Bandiera Blu and Bandiera Verde status, the latter marking it as paediatric-friendly. The Gulf of Squillace here stays shallow well out from shore.
• Torre di Carlo V. The tower stands alone on the Spina Santa spur above the Ionian, a lookout raised against pirate raids, and remains the most visible historic structure in town.
• Giardino Botanico Santicelli. The garden was laid out in 1980 on ground once used for waste, an early instance of urban land reclamation in the south, now holding Mediterranean and tropical plant collections.

How to get to Soverato

It has its own railway station. Reggio Calabria is about 1 h 50 min away by road.

Everything we know about Soverato

3. Trebisacce

Best for a walk through the old town. It is on the list of Italy's most beautiful villages.

1 h 44 min from Taranto · homes €720 to €980 a m² in the center · 8,653 people

Why visit Trebisacce

Trebisacce sits at 73 meters in the upper-Cosenza arc, on a hill whose flat top gave the town its name: the Greek Trapezàkion, small table, a literal description of the tabular ground the old town stands on. In antiquity the settlement held the road between Metaponto and Sybaris, twenty kilometers south on the Sibari plain, a position that put it on the trade routes long before the medieval walls went up.

The lower modern town runs along the seafront below; the plateau above keeps the old streets, the mother church, and the walls raised in the sixteenth century against Saracen raids. Inland and uphill, past the modern town, a rock-cut chapel sits inside a pine forest on Monte Mostarico, a different register of building from the stone church and the archaeological trenches below.

Read together, the layers, coastal plain, tabular hill, and inland forest, describe a town that has always faced two ways: out to the sea route and up to the higher, quieter ground behind it.

La Rotonda is listed in Gambero Rosso.

The catch: The nearest hospital is 26 km away, in Castrovillari.

What to see in Trebisacce

• Chiesa di San Nicola di Mira. Trullo-shaped dome and a tall pyramidal bell tower stand over the centro storico, the church's mass still setting the skyline of the old town.
• Broglio di Trebisacce. Excavated since 1979, the site has also given up a Hellenic necropolis alongside the Mycenaean finds, layered evidence of the plateau's long occupation.
• Centro storico sul plateau. Old town on the tabular hill that gives Trebisacce its name, ringed by sixteenth-century walls built against Saracen raids.

How to get to Trebisacce

It has its own railway station. Taranto is about 1 h 44 min away by road. The full route from Bari.

Everything we know about Trebisacce

4. Pizzo

1 h 15 min from Reggio Calabria · homes €790 to €1,100 a m² in the center · 8,744 people

Why visit Pizzo

Pizzo sits on a tuff promontory rising about 70 meters above the Tyrrhenian, at the northern end of the Costa degli Dei. The town's name for its own fortress, Castello Aragonese, has largely given way to Castello Murat, after the brother-in-law of Napoleon who landed here in October 1815 hoping to retake the throne of Naples, was captured by townspeople, and was court-martialled in the building he is now remembered by.

The tartufo gelato has a separate history entirely: developed by local gelato-makers in the twentieth century, hand-moulded into a hemisphere with a molten chocolate center and dusted with cocoa, it earned IGP status in 2021, the first gelato in Europe to do so. Two unrelated claims to fame, a captured king and a dessert, meet on summer evenings in the cliff-edge piazza where the town still gathers.

Pizzo's identity rests on that pairing: a fortress town that turned a moment of political violence and a piece of confectionery into the same civic memory.

Locanda Toscano (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and San Domenico Ristorante (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Pizzo

• Castello Aragonese (Murat). Fifteenth-century fortress on the headland, its main hall preserved as the room where Joachim Murat's court-martial and execution took place, now a museum to the Napoleonic king.
• Chiesa di Piedigrotta. Set into the cliff north of town, reached through low tufa passages that open into chambers where the carved figures stand at full height, worn smooth in places by damp and time.
• Piazza della Repubblica. Cliff-edge piazza with cafés and gelaterie, the social center of the town and the place to eat tartufo in summer.

How to get to Pizzo

It has its own railway station. Reggio Calabria is about 1 h 15 min away by road.

Everything we know about Pizzo

5. Belvedere Marittimo

Best for walks in a national park. Part of the comune lies in a national park.

2 h 43 min from Salerno · homes €760 to €1,100 a m² in the center · 9,009 people

Why visit Belvedere Marittimo

Belvedere Marittimo sits at 150 meters on the Tyrrhenian, fifty kilometers west of Cosenza. The municipal territory runs from Santa Litterata to Calabaja along the coast and climbs behind into the Pollino foothills, where the national park covers part of the commune: a town split between shoreline and mountain, with the built-up center held on the high ground between the two.

The Normans raised the original fortress around the year 1000 under Roger I, choosing the highest hill above the sea for it. Belvedere men sailed in the fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.

The relics kept in the Capuchin convent for more than three centuries gave the town its local title, Città dell'Amore, and the Riviera dei Cedri, the forty-kilometer run of coast from Tortora south to here, takes its name from the citron still grown on the hillsides above the houses. What holds the town together is the vertical arrangement: castle on the hilltop, convent below it, citron groves on the slopes, and the sea at the bottom, each layer named for what it has kept longest.

Sapori & Saperi is listed in Gambero Rosso.

What to see in Belvedere Marittimo

• Castello Aragonese. Built by the Normans around 1000, the fortress was reworked under Ferdinand of Aragon with ceremonial gates added alongside the crenellated walls. It commands the hill above the town and the sea below.
• Convento dei Cappuccini. The convent holding the relics of San Valentino sits away from the shoreline crowds, its quiet a contrast to the title the town has taken from it.
• Riviera dei Cedri. The stretch running from Tortora south to Belvedere passes beneath hillsides still planted with cedro, the citron visible above the rooftops.

How to get to Belvedere Marittimo

It has its own railway station. Salerno is about 2 h 43 min away by road.

Everything we know about Belvedere Marittimo

6. Bagnara Calabra

Best for a day out from Reggio Calabria. It is 23 min by car.

23 min from Reggio Calabria · homes €790 to €1,100 a m² in the center · 9,181 people

Why visit Bagnara Calabra

Bagnara Calabra is built into the hills above the Tyrrhenian on the Costa Viola, twenty-five kilometers north of Reggio Calabria, with the Strait of Messina opening to the south. The first organized settlement on record was the Abbey of Santa Maria and the Twelve Apostles, founded around 1085 by Roger I of Sicily.

Two things still define the town. Swordfish: Bagnara is the small capital of Calabrian swordfish, and the local fleet still uses the felucca or passerella, a tall-masted boat with a lookout high above the deck and a long bowsprit walkway from which the harpooner strikes; the practice goes back centuries and is shared with Scilla, six kilometers south.

Torrone: Bagnara torrone, a nougat of honey, sugar and almonds, has been made in the town since the eighteenth century and carries IGP status. The Bagnarote women, who carried the catch on their heads up the hills, are a fixture in Calabrian folklore.

Taverna Kerkira is listed in the MICHELIN Guide and Gambero Rosso.

What to see in Bagnara Calabra

• Basilica di Maria SS. del Rosario. Eighteenth-century basilica rebuilt after the 1908 earthquake, the main religious anchor of the town.
• Castello Emmarita. Ruins of a medieval fortress on the hill above town, with views down to the Tyrrhenian and across to Sicily.
• Spiagge della Costa Viola. Pebble and dark-sand beaches under steep cliffs, named for the violet light the coast takes at sunset.

How to get to Bagnara Calabra

It has its own railway station. Reggio Calabria is about 23 min away by road.

Everything we know about Bagnara Calabra