Arnold Jacobi arrived in Calabria in 1792. As he writes in his diary, he was enchanted when he faced the Gulf of S. Eufemia with the Mediterranean vegetation that bordered it: a forest of myrtle, rosemary, and fragrant thyme. Here - he said - nature had employed all its power to decorate the place with luxuriant plants, with undulating fields of grain, and meadows covered with multicolored flowers. Even in the 1800s, many foreign travelers came down to visit Calabria. Francesco Lenormant, the French archaeologist, came in 1879, and came back soon after. From this trip he left a long and detailed description, in a work in three famous volumes “La Grande Grece” that Giuseppe Isnardi called “the classic book that revealed to the Calabrian people themselves their own history.” Many are the pages that he dedicated to the Lamezian Plain, to its history, to its monuments, to its customs, and to its archaeological riches.

View of Nicastro (from Jean Claude Richard de Saint-Non,
Voyage Pittoresque ou Description des Royaumes
de Naples et de Sicilie, Paris 1781-1786

The coast seemed to him covered by “dense bushes of lentisco, pistachios, myrtle, laburnam, rock-rose, fruit-bearing heather, oleanders, and flowering vitex,” which here and there formed areas of forest that were difficult to reach. And then there were ample olive groves interspersed between plantations of figs, carobs, almonds and oranges. Arriving at the center of Nicastro, he was struck by the crumbling Norman castle, which from above dominated the houses that were clinging to each other below. Sticking up around the ruins was a rich garden of fruit-bearing trees with magnificent trellises, while Indian figs covered all the nearby rocks. Then he described the picturesque market-square, a type of “fair ground,” where he was struck by the “mensa ponderaria” (an ancient tool of weights and measures, currently on exhibition in the archaeological museum).

The Scottish humanist Craufurd Tait Ramage undertook his voyage through the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1828. In his pages that describe the ruins of Terina at Nicastro, the traveler underscores the hospitality of the people, and above all that of Don Michele Procida, whose home was “surrounded by plants that where we come from grow only in greenhouses.” After describing the curiosity that was aroused by his presence among the people of S. Biagio, Ramage emphasizes that the hills were “covered by immense olive trees and the balmy fragrance of the citrus groves in this zone could have induced me to think that I had arrived in blessed Arabia.” Even Nicastro elicited his astonishment. It was a city of elegant buildings, of romantic aspect, surmounted by the castle with massive towers. “Nothing can be more beautiful than this valley that I have crossed: the fields covered with flowers, laurel hedges, blueberries and pomegranates, making it into a real paradise. . .In the evening I went out on the hill that dominates the city, from which one can enjoy an agreeable view. . .the sun that was about to set gilded with its rays the Gulf of S. Eufemia. The ‘Sinus Terinaeus’(=Terinean coastline) offered one of the most beautiful spectacles imaginable, and it saddened me when the shadows of the evening obliged me to go away.”