Riace

On the sixteenth of August 1972 three boys told a young Roman diver that they had seen, under water about two hundred metres from the shore, an arm sticking out of the sandy bottom. Stefano Mariottini went down and found, at eight metres, two bronze warriors. The report he filed the next day describes them precisely: two naked male figures, one lying on its back with a flowing curly beard, arms open and one leg set forward of the other; the other lying on its side, with a shield on the left arm; dark brown, perfectly preserved, clean modelling, about a hundred and eighty centimetres tall. The carabinieri divers raised them with a balloon inflated from their air tanks: statue B on the twenty-first of August, statue A the following day — and A fell back to the bottom before it reached the beach safely. They are two of the five original Greek bronzes that have come down to us. But here they did not stay: after restoration in Florence and a brief showing in Rome, the Riace Bronzes are in the national museum of Reggio Calabria.

The name probably comes from the Byzantine Greek Ryaki, a little stream; another reading takes it much further back, to a Middle Eastern root meaning breath, wind, and would read Riace as the place of the wind — which would fit Strabo, who explains the names of the capes nearby by the western wind. The first document naming Riace is of 1562. On the coast, from 1583, there was a tower with a cannon against the Turkish raids, part of a chain of towers along the Ionian. In 1640 the community numbered four hundred people. The earthquake of 1783 killed one person here and did twenty thousand ducats of damage. From the two-thousands the village became known for something else: the model of reception of asylum seekers and refugees built up by its mayor, Domenico Lucano, which brought hundreds of people from twenty countries here and kept the school open. It ended in a long judicial case over the finances of the project: sentenced at first instance, Lucano was acquitted on appeal — the judges held that that way of managing reception was not a crime — and he was elected mayor again.