Things to See in Reggio Calabria | 2 Monuments & Landmarks

All the monuments in Reggio Calabria

The landmarks and masterpieces worth planning a day around.

Palazzo Piacentini, home of the Riace Bronzes in Reggio Calabria

Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Reggio CalabriaNational Museum of Magna GraeciaRiace Bronzes, fifth-century BC Greek warriors, climate-controlled display hall, Magna Graecia collectionIn August 1972, a snorkeler off Riace Marina spotted what looked like an arm buried in the sand, and it turned out to belong to one of two full-size Greek bronze warriors, cast around the fifth century BC and lost to the sea for more than two thousand years. Both statues spent years in restoration in Florence before Reggio Calabria's archaeological museum built them a room of their own: visitors pass through a climate-controlled anteroom first, so the display hall itself stays at a stable temperature and humidity. The museum around them holds one of Italy's richest collections of Magna Graecia material, from painted vases to architectural terracottas, but the Riace Bronzes, entered on their own after the wait, remain the reason most people come.Plan the visit

Sinagoga di Bova MarinaHidden GemBova Marina SynagogueMenorah mosaic floor, second-oldest synagogue in Italy, Museo Archeoderi, 1983 discoveryRoad workers modernizing a street in 1983 uncovered the remains of the second-oldest synagogue found in Italy, a fourth-to-sixth-century building whose thirty-square-meter mosaic floor still carries a menorah, a shofar, an etrog and palm branch, and a Solomon's knot worked in tesserae. Archaeologists first mistook the two-chamber structure for a Roman villa until the Jewish symbols surfaced. Only the Ostia Antica synagogue near Rome is older. The finds and a reconstruction of the mosaic are displayed at the small on-site Museo Archeoderi, part of an archaeological park now managed by Calabria's regional museum authority, and a rabbi from the small local Jewish community sometimes leads tours of the site.

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Monuments a day trip away, elsewhere in Calabria.

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