The name is younger than eighty years. Until the 1950s the cave here was the grotta Saracena, after the corsairs who worked this stretch of coast and used it as a landing and a shelter; then a holidaymaker sent home a postcard of the cove with Arco Magno written across it. The postcard travelled, the improvised christening stuck, and that is what the maps say today. The village stands 110 metres higher, on a cliff facing the island of Dino; below it the sea has drilled through the rock and left an arch some twenty metres high, closing off a strip of shingle a few paces long.
What to see
The arch is the whole point. From the path it looks like a gateway cut in the limestone; from inside, the cove frames the open sea like a window, and the light coming through the opening changes the place hour by hour: at midday you read the seabed stone by stone, by late afternoon the inside falls into shadow while the water outside stays lit. The beach behind the arch is tiny, shingle and rock, and it fills up fast.
The rest of the coast is worth the walk even without going down. A little to the north opens the Arco di Enea, a smaller second arch that local legend makes the landing place of the Trojan ships, looking onto the caletta del Monaco; in front of it sits the Scorzone islet, a miniature of the island of Dino. On the opposite headland stands the Crawford tower, a lookout post dated to 1400 and named after the American writer Francis Marion Crawford, who lived in it around the turn of the twentieth century and drew from this coast a vampire story people here still retell.
Visiting
You can only arrive on foot, and the descent is the serious part of the day. Two paths drop from the village: the southern one starts at Marinella beach with a flight of steps and goes on through the scrub, the northern one comes down on the Arco di Enea side. Twenty minutes or so on uneven ground, with stretches signposted for falling rock: closed shoes, not flip-flops. In summer a municipal order controls access, with staff on site from 8 to 20, a ticket at 3 euros and a strictly limited stay on the little beach; umbrellas, loungers and food stay outside, and taking a boat under the arch is forbidden. The Arcomagno-Grande Canale Marinella stretch held the Blue Flag in 2026, its eighth year in a row.
Our editors' tip
We go at opening time, eight in the morning: an hour later the queue on the path is long and the few minutes allowed on the sand are spent waiting. If the line has already formed, skip it and walk up to the village belvedere instead: at sunset it takes in Calabria, Basilicata and Campania at once, with the island of Dino and the tower below. Then go down to the harbour to eat.
