Day trips
Day trips from Catanzaro
14 towns within 90 minutes
Closest first. Cicala is 36 minutes out. Drive times are computed on real roads, so they are a fair estimate rather than a promise about traffic.
Cicala
Province: Catanzaro · 829 m
36 minutes from Catanzaro. A village of 887 people at 829 meters, founded in 1616 by farmers asking for land.
Soverato
Province: Catanzaro · 10 m
36 minutes from Catanzaro. The wealthiest town per capita in Calabria, built around a white-sand stretch on the Ionian shore.
Pizzo
Province: Vibo Valentia · 44 m
43 minutes from Catanzaro. A tuff-cliff town over the Gulf of Sant'Eufemia, where a king was shot in 1815 and the tartufo gelato was invented a century later.
Gizzeria
Province: Catanzaro · 600 m
48 minutes from Catanzaro. An Arbëreshë hill village at 600 meters above the Gulf of Sant'Eufemia, with kitesurf beaches and brackish lagoons on the Tyrrhenian below.
Serrastretta
Province: Catanzaro · 840 m
48 minutes from Catanzaro. The chair town of the Reventino massif, founded in 1383 in a narrow gorge between two mountain ranges, still weaving straw seats by hand.
Isola di Capo Rizzuto
Province: Crotone · 90 m
55 minutes from Catanzaro. A promontory on the Ionian coast wrapped by Italy's largest marine reserve, with an Aragonese castle standing on a rock offshore.
Badolato
Province: Catanzaro · 240 m
56 minutes from Catanzaro. A medieval borgo of thirteen churches at 240 meters above the Ionian, which took in 350 Kurdish refugees in 1997 and started its own slow rebirth.
Taverna
Province: Catanzaro · 530 m
64 minutes from Catanzaro. A hilltown at the foot of a mountain plateau, its stone core arranged around a fifteenth-century Dominican church.
Aiello Calabro
Province: Cosenza · 502 m
65 minutes from Catanzaro. A hilltop borgo at 502 meters in the Tyrrhenian hinterland of Cosenza, ruled for two centuries by the Cybo-Malaspina from Massa Carrara.
Santa Severina
Province: Crotone · 326 m
74 minutes from Catanzaro. A tufa-rock stone ship between the Sila and the Ionian, holding the only Byzantine baptistery still standing in Calabria.
Tropea
Province: Vibo Valentia · 50 m
79 minutes from Catanzaro. Cliff town on a tufa headland over the Tyrrhenian Coast of the Gods, with a Norman monastery on a sea rock.
Parghelia
Province: Vibo Valentia · 70 m
80 minutes from Catanzaro. A 1,300-person village on the Costa degli Dei at 70 meters, four kilometers from Tropea and quieter than its famous neighbour.
Riace
Province: Reggio di Calabria · 300 m
80 minutes from Catanzaro. A 300-meter borgo on the Locride hills, famous for the 1972 bronzes pulled from its sea and the refugee resettlement project that doubled its population.
Fiumefreddo Bruzio
Province: Cosenza · 220 m
83 minutes from Catanzaro. A Tyrrhenian hill town under Monte Cocuzzo, with a thirteenth-century castle frescoed in the 1990s.
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From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns to discover
Visso
Province: Macerata
The northern Sibillini gate at 607 meters where the Nera meets the Ussita, holding one of two surviving manuscripts of Leopardi's L'Infinito.
Goriano Sicoli
Province: L'Aquila
At 720 meters in the Subequana valley, a medieval village drawn by M.C. Escher in 1929 keeps a May ritual folklorists trace to Demeter.
Ugento
Province: Lecce
A Messapian-Roman town five kilometers from the Ionian, where a Baroque castle sits on the walls of the ancient city of Ozan.
Fontanellato
Province: Parma
A Parma-plain town built around the Rocca Sanvitale, the moated fortress at its center.
Pescina
Province: L'Aquila
A Marsica town at 735 meters, on the rim of the drained Fucino basin, that lost five thousand of six thousand people in a single morning in 1915.