Sibari holidays

Sibari holidays are for the history buffs – this Calabrian town was once a Greek city, and it has the ruins to prove it.

All about the archaeology

Holiday-goers come to Sibari for the sun and stay for the history. That’s because the main tourist attraction in this southern Italian town, which sits on a section of Calabria’s Ionian Coast, is a 500-hectare archaeological park. It contains the ruins of an ancient Greek city founded in the 8th century BCE, which went on to become a Roman colony under the name of Copiae (and later, Thurii). The Torro Cozzante or Butting Bull is housed there, and is well worth a gander – it’s well-known symbol of the ancient city, representing strength and divine power. The more you know…

A stone’s throw from sandy shores

While this place isn’t on the coast, it’s close enough that beach days are a doddle. A 10-minute drive gets you to the Marina di Sibari area – Sibari’s seaside neighbour, which inches up to a long stretch of golden shoreline backed by a pine forest so dense it looks like a bunch of broccoli from above. It’s also only a few minutes further to Sibari Lakes, too. They feed into a fancy marina built specifically for tourism in the 1970s and, yes, you can swim in them. So, don’t forget your cozzie.

Culture-crammed towns and nature-packed parks

When you’re not sunbathing or snapping pics of ancient ruins, you might want to pop over to one of the local towns for a mooch, since Sibari doesn’t have a traditional centre to keep you occupied. Rossano’s a popular one – this place is considered the capital of Greek-Byzantine culture in Calabria. It hosted monks who fled Sicily in the 8th and 9th centuries, and looks after the UNESCO-listed Codex Purpureus Rossanensis, which is one of the oldest New Testament manuscripts. Nature lovers won’t want to miss Pollino National Park, either. It’s the biggest one in Italy, spanning nearly 200 thousand hectares.