Marina di Gioiosa Ionica

Here the Romans called the territory Subsicivum, that is unassigned land, and set in it a pagus with a statio, a stopping place for people and for horses. Between the second and the first century before Christ they also built a theatre there, Roman work but carried out by Greek craftsmen, later reshaped in the second century after Christ according to more strictly Roman rules: it stands above the coast road, which was the main decumanus, and faces the sea. Nobody remembered it any more: it was found by chance in 1882 and completely brought to light by excavations finished in 1925. The end of the Roman town probably came with the tidal wave that followed the Crete earthquake of 365, the same wave that devastated Alexandria in Egypt and was felt as far as the Balearics.

After that the coast emptied, and not only because of raids: there was malaria, encouraged by deforestation and by the marshing of the plain, and people went up to stay safe in fortified Gioiosa. Malaria marked the whole Ionian strip of Calabria until the twentieth century and was defeated only after the Second World War. In the sixteenth century the stones of the ancient town served to build the coastal tower against the pirates, today called del Cavallaro. The return to the sea began in the eighteenth century with the fishermen's houses, and became serious from 1875, when the Ionian railway and its station made the Marina the trading centre of the whole Torbido valley, as it had been in Roman times. It has been an independent municipality only since 1948.