Reggio Calabria

Around 720 BCE, settlers from Chalcis on the island of Euboea sailed west through the Strait of Messina and founded a colony on the Italian shore. They called it Rhegion, and the Greek geographer Strabo, writing around 7 BCE, records the local explanation: tradition held that the strait between Italy and Sicily had once been dry land, and the sea broke through, splitting the two landmasses apart. The name came from 'rhegnymi,' the Greek verb meaning to break or to burst.

Whether the volcanic rupture happened as described matters less than the word it produced. 'Rhegnymi' is an ancient Indo-European verb related to Latin 'frangere,' meaning to break, and to Sanskrit 'bharjati.' The same Greek root gave medical English 'rhexis,' meaning rupture, which passed directly from Greek surgical texts into Latin and then into modern usage. Rhegion sat on one of the most seismically active zones in Europe, and its name acknowledged a geological fact.

Rome absorbed Rhegion in 271 BCE after a prolonged siege. The Romans called it Rhegium and made it a key port for communication with Sicily and Greece. After the Western Empire fell, the city passed through Byzantine, Arab, and Norman hands, each reshaping its politics and architecture. The Normans who arrived in 1059 wrote it as Regium, and Italian eventually softened and expanded this to Reggio.

'Calabria' was added to distinguish the city from Reggio Emilia in northern Italy, a different settlement with a different historical root. The Calabrian Reggio was destroyed and rebuilt by earthquakes multiple times, including a catastrophic event in 1908 that killed more than 80,000 people in the city and nearby Messina. The city of breaking, named for a breaking, has been broken and remade with a consistency that vindicates its name.