San Nicola Arcella

San Nicola Arcella sits on a cliff above the Tyrrhenian Sea in the northern Riviera dei Cedri, between Scalea and Praia a Mare. The settlement traces back to the Greek colony of Lao and its Roman successor Lavinium on the same stretch of coast. The hilltop relocation followed the Saracen raids of the early Middle Ages, when villagers moved uphill behind a watch tower, and the Arcella part of the name comes from the rock the village sits on.

Prince Pietro Lanza Branciforte, who married the last heir of the Spinelli di Scalea family in the nineteenth century, expanded the fishing economy and built out the urban core, which became an autonomous commune in 1811. That core still sits on the rock the raids drove people to, while the watchtower built for the same defense on the southern headland later found a second use as a writer's study. The village today is the sum of that retreat uphill and that later reuse: a defensive settlement that outlasted the danger it was built for and let the coast below it, arch, cove and all, become the draw instead.