A History of Southern Italy in 15 Places

History is everywhere in the Mezzogiorno

The south has been a Mediterranean crossroads for millennia. Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Saracens, Ottomans, Normans, French, Spanish, Austrians and Germans all reached its shores or crossed its territory. Some encounters were peaceful and others violent, but together they shaped the region's languages, dialects, art, architecture, food, wine and temperament.

The places below are not only grand monuments. They include a quarry that became a prison, a submerged resort, a neighbourhood of catacombs, a mural and a cave settlement that turned a painful past into a new future.

1. Gravina in Puglia: an ancient highway

The Peucetians founded Gravina in Puglia in the 8th or 7th century BCE, making it one of southern Italy's oldest settlements. Its position on the Via Appia, the Roman road linking Rome with the Adriatic port of Brindisi, brought prosperity under Roman rule. The Romans called the town Silvium, and its strategic location earned it a mention in Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia, the last work published by the Roman writer and naturalist and the largest single work to survive from the Roman Empire.

2. Valley of the Temples: a Greek golden age

The Greek city of Akragas, modern Agrigento, was founded in 581 BCE, although Greek settlers had been arriving in parts of southern Italy from the 7th and 8th centuries BCE. Their colonies became Magna Graecia, and Akragas' temples embody a cultural high point that produced figures such as Archimedes of Syracuse and the philosopher Empedocles of Akragas. Pressure from Carthage to the south and the Etruscans to the north eventually pushed Greek cities towards an alliance with Rome. By 270 BCE, the whole Mezzogiorno was under Roman control.

3. Latomia del Paradiso: a garden of paradise

After Syracuse defeated Athens during the Peloponnesian War in 413 BCE, 7000 captured soldiers from mainland Greece were confined in Syracuse's Garden of Paradise and left to die. The former limestone quarry is now scented by citrus and magnolia, but it once formed part of the largest city in the ancient world under the tyrant Dionysius I, who ruled from 432 to 367 BCE.

Dionysius is said to have listened to prisoners from the entrance of the Orecchio di Dionisio, or Ear of Dionysius. The cavern drops steeply and has such powerful acoustics that the ruler could hear words spoken by victims about 23 m below.

4. Ortygia: Archimedes' war machines

The Greek philosopher and engineer Archimedes, who lived around 287 to 212 or 211 BCE, designed weapons that kept Roman forces away from Syracuse for two years. Catapults could throw objects weighing more than 300 kg. Copper shields were said to focus the sun's rays onto Roman vessels, while the Claw of Archimedes used a wooden crane to grab a galley by the prow, lift it and drop it until the ship capsized or sank.

Syracuse finally lost its independence in 211 BCE, when a small group of Roman soldiers climbed the city walls and entered the city. The episode connects Ortygia's elegant streets to the engineering and warfare of the ancient Mediterranean.

5. Baia Sommersa: Roman decadence beneath the water

Before Ibiza, Baia was the pleasure resort of the Roman elite. Its thermal waters and mild climate, west of Naples in the Campi Flegrei, began attracting wealthy visitors from the latter part of the 2nd century BCE. Cicero, Virgil and Nero all came for otium, spending leisure time in lavish seaside villas and sprawling thermal baths.

Bradyseism, the gradual rise and fall of the earth's crust, eventually lowered much of Baia beneath the sea. Parts of the baths remain on land, but many of the villas and streets now lie underwater. The same geological movement forced the evacuation of Pozzuoli's historic Rione Terra district in 1970.

6. Pompeii: a deadly eruption

Pliny the Younger watched the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE from a villa at Misenum and described darkness arriving as though a lamp had been extinguished in a closed room. A 2021 study by the University of Bari, the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology and the British Geological Survey estimated that the volcano's ash and gas cloud asphyxiated Pompeii's inhabitants in about 15 minutes.

The danger is not only archaeological. Around 600,000 people now live in the zona rossa, the red zone directly exposed to Vesuvius' pyroclastic flows. A visit to Pompeii therefore connects a preserved ancient disaster with a modern city still living beside an active volcano.

7. Catacombe di San Gennaro: graves and early Christian art

In 305 CE, San Gennaro became a martyr after being beheaded at the Solfatara crater in Pozzuoli. He would later become Naples' beloved patron saint. His remains were first buried in the large catacomb complex that now lies in Capodimonte, where three kinds of tomb reveal the social hierarchy of the community.

The walls preserve some of the earliest known examples of Paleo-Christian art. In several designs, Christian symbols appear over the fading traces of Roman religion. The catacombs also contain the earliest known portrait of San Gennaro.

8. Cattedrale di Monreale: Arab-Norman splendour

Sicily's Norman kingdom, which lasted from 1130 to 1194, created an architectural language combining Arab, Byzantine and classical craftsmanship. King William II, who ruled from 1166 to 1189, chose a royal hunting ground 8 km southwest of Palermo for the glittering cathedral at Monreale.

The foundation story says that the Virgin appeared to William in a vision while he slept beneath a carob tree. She directed him to a hidden treasure and asked him to build a temple on the spot. Whether read as legend or royal propaganda, the story explains the cathedral's connection between sacred vision, Norman power and the cultural mixture of medieval Sicily.

9. Amalfi: a pocket-sized maritime powerhouse

The 14th-century poet Petrarch recorded a storm in which waves approached Naples from Capri like white mountains. The tsunami of 25 November 1343 is thought to have been triggered by the partial collapse of Sicily's Stromboli volcano, and it devastated Amalfi, once a wealthy maritime republic.

Amalfi's merchants traded so widely that Constantinople had its own Amalfi Quarter. Their wealth and international connections shaped the town's cathedral and identity. The Normans captured Amalfi in 1131, ending almost two centuries of independent rule.

10. Parco Nazionale del Pollino: Albanians in the forest

The Arbëresh are an Italo-Albanian ethnolinguistic minority living in 49 mountain towns and villages between Abruzzo and Sicily. Inside Parco Nazionale del Pollino, their communities include San Paolo Albanese, San Costantino Albanese and Civita.

Some Albanian settlements in southern Italy date to the 13th century, but the main migration happened between the middle of the 15th and middle of the 17th centuries, when refugees moved west to escape the Ottomans. The Arbëresh dialects that developed in Italy now differ substantially from both standard Albanian and Albania's regional dialects.

11. Mount Etna: an icon of the Grand Tour

Mount Etna has inspired both fascination and fear. Greek mythology placed the workshops of Hephaestus and the Cyclops beneath its red fire, while 18th-century European travellers made the ascent an essential stop on the Grand Tour. In 1816, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe described setting out on mules, crossing the lava zone and meeting jagged, time-resistant rocks. The volcano remains a landscape where myth, travel and active geology overlap.

12. Positano: the deep bite of the coast

Writers and artists transformed Campania's fishing villages when they began arriving on the coast. Grand seaside hotels followed, celebrities filled streets and squares, and the modern myth of the Amalfi Coast took shape. Positano became its clearest symbol: stacked houses and a yellow-tiled cupola captured John Steinbeck's imagination and later the world's.

The town still holds on to its earlier character, but the crowds make it a fragile place to travel. Its name remains shorthand for the Italian dream, while its history asks visitors to move carefully through a landscape under pressure.

13. No Mafia Memorial: shedding a troubled past

Calabria is associated with the powerful 'ndrangheta, but the word Mafia often brings Sicily's Cosa Nostra to mind. Popular culture made the island's organisation famous, while its influence damaged the economy, institutions and environment. In 1959, the Corleonesi mobster Vito Ciancimino became Palermo's head of public works and destroyed Art Nouveau buildings and green spaces in the campaign remembered as the Sack of Palermo.

The assassinations of anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992 galvanised local resistance. Palermo's No Mafia Memorial records that struggle and the continuing effort to free communities from organised crime's control.

14. Maradona Mural: a Neapolitan anti-hero

Naples has many saints, but Diego Maradona occupies a place of his own. The footballer brought two championships to the city and is revered throughout Naples, especially in the Quartieri Spagnoli, a central neighbourhood of narrow streets and almost mystical intensity.

After Maradona died in 2020, a shrine grew beneath the mural painted in his image after the 1990 Scudetto victory. When Naples won its third championship in 2023, the square became the centre of a new celebration and another so-called Maradona miracle. The site shows how modern sport can take on the emotional role once reserved for saints and civic heroes.

15. Sassi di Matera: a cavernous reinvention

In 1926, social activist Umberto Zanotti Bianco described Matera's Sassi as a Dantean horror. The crowded cave dwellings were unsanitary and widely treated as the vergogna, or shame, of 20th-century Italy. The residents were moved out en masse during the 1950s, leaving the caves to a small number of squatters and artists.

The Italian government encouraged restoration with subsidies introduced in 1986. UNESCO declared the Sassi a World Heritage Site in 1993, bringing visitors and speeding the conversion of caves into boutique hotels, restaurants and spas. Matera's designation as European Capital of Culture in 2019 confirmed the scale of its transformation from neglected settlement to one of southern Italy's most compelling destinations.