Agnana Calabra is a village of a few hundred inhabitants that mined coal for a century. In its territory, under the Bourbons, lignite and anthracite were dug out, and from here came the fuel that fired the first train on the Naples-Portici line and later served in the building of the Rome-Frascati railway. On 19 May 1846 Ferdinand II came in person to see the seams, with his wife and the heir to the throne. After Italian unification the funding dried up, the work declined, and in 1910 the mines closed.
From that same subsoil comes a fossil too: in one of the local lignites a rare specimen of Anthracotherium was found, a mammal that lived some thirty million years ago, now kept in the palaeontology museum of the university of Naples. The village, founded around the middle of the fourteenth century beside a monastery of Basilian monks on the mountain from which it takes its name, was for centuries no more than a hamlet of Canolo: it became a comune in 1841, and the name it now bears dates from 1881. At Junchi there are mineral springs, with the ruins of the basins where people once took the cure.
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📅 Every year, on 14 June (18 August is also among its feast days)
On 14 June Agnana Calabra, a municipality of 569 inhabitants in the province of Reggio Calabria, celebrates its patrons Saint Basil the Great and Mary Most Holy of Mercy; another feast day is 18 August.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Agnana Calabra, but an easy day trip away.
