Cariati

Cariati stretches along the Ionian coast of northern Calabria, sixty-five kilometers east of Cosenza, split between the hill town above the sea and the marina below. The Bretti settled the territory in the fourth and third centuries BC and a Roman foundation called Paternum followed. Saracen raids and malaria forced the inhabitants up the hill in the early Middle Ages, where the present town took shape under Byzantine fortification: the wall that still rings the upper settlement dates from this period of retreat.

The cathedral sits inside those walls, a medieval foundation carried forward in a nineteenth-century neoclassical rebuilding, its dome visible from the road along the coast. Below, the marina holds the beach and the harbor, its territory also recognized with a Spighe Verdi designation, and in summer the working fleet's catch is grilled the length of the lungomare during the Sagra del Pesce Azzurro. The town's shape, an upper refuge and a lower shore settlement, still reads as the direct outcome of that flight from raiders and fever centuries ago.