Themed picks · Lamezia Terme · Hill towns
10 Calabrian hill towns near Lamezia Terme
Ten towns: what each is best for, what a home costs, and the catch. A square meter runs from €400 in Aiello Calabro to €850 in San Giovanni in Fiore.
10 comuni · within 120 minutes of Lamezia Terme · drive times by road from Lamezia Terme airport
Calabria is the longest peninsula on the Italian mainland and the least traveled of the southern regions. Its mountain spine, the Apennines, runs unbroken from the Basilicata border down to the Aspromonte massif that ends in the Strait of Messina. The interior of that range holds two national parks (Sila to the north, Aspromonte to the south), the last Greek-speaking villages of mainland Italy (the Grecanico-dialect comuni of Roghudi, Gallicianò, Bova), and the source of two distinctive foods that have only recently found their way north: bergamot (grown nowhere else, the citrus that goes into Earl Gray tea), and 'nduja (the spreadable spicy salami from the inland comune of Spilinga).
Lamezia Terme is the practical base. Its airport is the busiest in Calabria and sits on the narrowest part of the peninsula, where the Tyrrhenian and the Ionian coasts are about 35 kilometers apart, so both coasts and the mountains between them are within a day's reach. The A2 motorway runs north toward Cosenza and the Sila and south toward Vibo Valentia and Reggio; the SS280 crosses to Catanzaro and the Ionian side.
We picked ten comuni across the hills that rise straight behind the airport (Gizzeria, Serrastretta, Cicala), the Sila (Taverna, San Giovanni in Fiore, Spezzano della Sila), the hills around Cosenza (Aiello Calabro, Mendicino), Saracena under the Pollino to the north, and Gerace on the Ionian side. Drive times below are by road from Lamezia Terme airport and reflect the steep mountain roads honestly; the inland comuni take longer than the map distances suggest. The deep Aspromonte, Bova among its villages, sits beyond this two-hour drive.
The towns
1Catanzaro · Calabria · 29 min from Lamezia Terme
Gizzeria
homes €640 to €770 a m² in the center · 5,362 people
An Arbëreshë hill village at 600 meters above the Gulf of Sant'Eufemia, with kitesurf beaches and brackish lagoons on the Tyrrhenian below.
Founded around 1450, by tradition by Albanian exiles who fled the Turks; the village is still called Jacari in Arbëreshë.
Borghi Autentici network member.
2Catanzaro · Calabria · 48 min from Lamezia Terme
Serrastretta
Best for a long lunch. A food guide lists Il Vecchio Castagno here.
homes €520 to €620 a m² in the center · 2,885 people
The chair town of the Reventino massif, founded in 1383 in a narrow gorge between two mountain ranges, still weaving straw seats by hand.
Hand-woven vuda-and-beech chairs produced for centuries along the Via dei Sediari, the town's signature craft.
3Catanzaro · Calabria · 50 min from Lamezia Terme
Cicala
Best for a small town. 841 people live here.
homes €520 to €620 a m² in the center · 841 people
A village of 841 people at 829 meters, founded in 1616 by farmers asking for land.
The village took its name from Count Cigala, who in 1616 granted land at Trempa di Castagna to local farmers.
4Catanzaro · Calabria · 1 h 3 min from Lamezia Terme
Taverna
Best for a slow weekend. The Touring Club gives it its orange flag for small inland towns.
homes €620 to €840 a m² in the center · 2,492 people
A hilltown at the foot of a mountain plateau, its stone core arranged around a fifteenth-century Dominican church.
Baroque painter born in Taverna in 1613, the Cavaliere Calabrese; eleven of his canvases hang in San Domenico.
Inside a national park, at 530 m.
5Cosenza · Calabria · 49 min from Lamezia Terme
Aiello Calabro
Best for a walk through the old town. It is on the list of Italy's most beautiful villages.
homes €400 to €590 a m² in the center · 1,338 people
A hilltop borgo at 502 meters in the Tyrrhenian hinterland of Cosenza, ruled for two centuries by the Cybo-Malaspina from Massa Carrara.
Ligurian-Tuscan family from Massa Carrara who bought the fief in 1566 for 38,000 ducats and held it as duchy until 1806.
Listed in I Borghi più belli d'Italia, 502 m.
The catch: It has lost 23% of its people since 2015.
6Reggio Calabria · Calabria · 1 h 45 min from Lamezia Terme
Gerace
Best for olive oil. It belongs to the national association of olive oil towns.
homes €560 to €830 a m² in the center · 2,309 people
A 470-meter conglomerate rock above the Locride, holding Calabria's largest cathedral.
Calabria's largest cathedral, Norman 1100, with twenty-six mismatched Roman columns in the crypt taken from the temples of Locri Epizefiri.
Listed in I Borghi più belli d'Italia, 470 m.
7Cosenza · Calabria · 1 h 18 min from Lamezia Terme
Spezzano della Sila
Best for a ski week. There is a mapped ski area in the comune.
homes €590 to €810 a m² in the center · 4,263 people
A Sila plateau borgo at 800 meters, the gateway to the national park and its high forests.
Western gateway to the park, with the Cupone visitor center, Lake Cecita and the Giants of the Sila inside the commune boundary.
Inside a national park, at 800 m.
8Cosenza · Calabria · 1 h 56 min from Lamezia Terme
Saracena
Best for truffle season. It belongs to the national association of truffle towns.
homes €410 to €590 a m² in the center · 3,288 people
A 606-meter Pollino borgo named for the Saracens said to have settled it around 900 AD, and protected by Slow Food for a passito Moscato traced to the sixteenth century.
Slow Food Presidium passito blended from four white grapes, first recorded in the sixteenth century, with a Casa del Moscato inaugurated in 2026.
Inside a national park, at 606 m.
The catch: It has lost 15% of its people since 2015.
9Cosenza · Calabria · 1 h 49 min from Lamezia Terme
San Giovanni in Fiore
Best for a wine weekend. It belongs to the national association of wine towns.
homes €590 to €850 a m² in the center · 15,487 people
The capital of the Sila Grande at 1,049 meters, Italy's most populated commune above a thousand.
Founder of the Florense order and one of the most influential apocalyptic thinkers of the Middle Ages, born at Celico in the Sila around 1130.
Inside a national park, at 1049 m.
10Cosenza · Calabria · 1 h 21 min from Lamezia Terme
Mendicino
homes €530 to €760 a m² in the center · 8,942 people
A silk-mill village at the foot of Monte Cocuzzo, ten kilometers from Cosenza, where water still drives the old spinning wheels.
Center of Calabrian bachisericoltura; the water-powered Setificio Gaudio survives as a museum of the trade.
We write about towns like these one town at a time, with the photo, the food, the festa. Free, from Turin.
Why Lamezia Terme is the base
Lamezia Terme is not a destination in itself, but its airport, its station on the main Tyrrhenian line and the A2 make it the one place in Calabria from which the Sila, the Reventino and both coasts are each a day trip. Reggio Calabria, about an hour and a half south, has the Museo Archeologico Nazionale and the Bronzi di Riace, and is worth a night on the way to or from the Strait. The food on the coast (swordfish prepared every way, the rosamarina anchovy paste) sets up the inland trips, where it shifts to mountain salumi, Sila potatoes and porcini, and the Cirò wines from the Ionian side.
When to go
May, June, September and October are the strongest windows for the inland comuni. The Aspromonte road system is at its best in late spring and early autumn; summer is bearable inland because the elevation drops the temperatures, but the access roads dry out and dust up. Winter brings real snow to the upper Sila (Camigliatello, San Giovanni in Fiore) and the Aspromonte's higher villages; the coastal comuni stay open year-round. Bergamot harvest is October through February (the picking happens in November), which is the strongest reason to come in winter.
Questions people ask
- What is the Sila?
- The high plateau of central Calabria, much of it above 1,200 meters, under pine and beech forest and around three reservoir lakes (Arvo, Ampollino, Cecita). The Sila National Park, established in 2002, covers much of it; its highest point is Botte Donato at 1,928 m. Taverna, San Giovanni in Fiore and Spezzano della Sila on this list are Sila towns.
- Where are the Grecanico-dialect villages?
- Bova, Gallicianò, Roghudi, and Condofuri are the four main comuni where Greco-Calabrian (Grico) is still spoken, though only by older speakers. All sit in the southern Aspromonte at 700 to 900 m elevation, beyond this list's two-hour drive from Lamezia. Bova has a small museum of Grecanico language and culture.
- Are the Bronzi di Riace worth the drive to Reggio?
- Yes. The two 5th-century BC Greek bronzes are among the only large-scale ancient Greek bronze sculptures to survive; they were recovered from the seabed in 1972 by a snorkeller off Riace Marina. The Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Reggio, about an hour and a half south of Lamezia on the A2, displays them in a dedicated climate-controlled room. The museum visit takes 2 hours minimum.
- What is the difference between 'nduja and other Calabrian salumi?
- 'Nduja is a spreadable, intensely spicy pork salami from the inland comune of Spilinga (north of Reggio, on the western Tyrrhenian coast). It is fermented and smoked with a high percentage of Calabrian peperoncino. Unlike soppressata, capocollo, or salsiccia (the other Calabrian salumi), 'nduja is soft enough to spread on bread and is used as a cooking base across the regional cuisine.
How we picked these · We took every Calabrian town in our catalogue within two hours of Lamezia Terme airport by car (24 of them), kept the 14 inland hill towns carrying Borghi più belli, Bandiera Arancione, Parco Nazionale or Borghi Autentici, and ranked them by those designations, by elevation and by how close they are. The two-hour radius reflects how steep and slow the Calabrian mountain roads are.
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