Campo Calabro

The name comes from the Latin campus, field, and the administrative history is short: Campo Calabro has been an independent comune only since 1950, because before that it was the most populous mountain hamlet of Villa San Giovanni, so much so that they called it Villa San Giovanni superiore to tell it apart from the town down by the sea. The coat of arms, granted in 1955, tells however three things about the place. There is a honey buzzard, which here they call adorno: hunting it, now forbidden, was practised by the local hunters, who posted themselves on the hills to shoot the birds as they came up the coast on the rising currents of the Strait. There are the bunch of grapes and the ears of wheat, the two chief products of the fields. And there is the silver ground, which recalls the snow: they carried it down from the Aspromonte and kept it in the cool cellars of the houses, to make summer drinks.

Above the town stands the fort, the largest Umbertine fortification of the Strait of Messina, both in size and in architectural value: it was among the first to be built and it took four years, from 1884 to 1888. Campo Calabro is the birthplace of Antonino Scopelliti, the magistrate killed by the mafia in the summer of 1991, and of the antifascist teacher and lawyer Francesco Geraci. In the house where lieutenant Galimi was born, fallen on the Carso in the first world war, three rooms on the ground floor have been restored to their original state with period furniture and turned into a house museum, opened in 2017 for the centenary of his death: inside are the keepsakes, the photographs and the documents concerning his life and the circumstances in which he died in action.