San Nicola Arcella

The village comes from Scalea, which was founded by the survivors of Lavinium, the Roman town at the mouth of the Lao that had risen after the destruction of the Greek city of Laos. The malaria that infested the plain of the Lao and the Saracen raids drove those people up onto the heights, and in Byzantine times Scalea and its casale — this place — were born. It was called San Nicola dei Greci; the present name is Bourbon, and the Arcella seems to come from the rock — arx in Latin — on which the survivors had taken refuge. The village stands on a drop of a hundred and ten metres, and below it lies a bay closed by an arm of rock that gives it the shape of a natural harbour. The oldest part is still called Casaletto, the houses of the court: it was built by the colonists of the prince of Scalea together with the local people, who were mostly fishermen. The fief stayed with the princes until the French abolished feudalism in 1806; in 1811 San Nicola was registered as a hamlet of Scalea, and it became a comune of its own only a century later, in 1912.

On the promontory looking over the bay stands an old watchtower of the fifteenth century. They call it the Crawford tower because Francis Marion Crawford, an American writer, lived there between the end of the eighteen hundreds and the beginning of the nineteen hundreds; his best known story is about Cristina, a woman of San Nicola who is said to have become a vampire, and her tomb is supposed to be in the lower tower behind Crawford's. Further along the coast there is a cave with an enormous arch, some twenty metres high, opening onto a small beach. It was called the Saracen grotto, because the Saracens used it as a passage and a refuge, and that was its name until the nineteen-fifties, when a tourist, struck by the arch, wrote Arco Magno on a postcard of the beach. The postcard became famous, and the name the tourist had invented became the official one.