Santa Maria dell'Isola Monastery

Below the cliff-top old town of Tropea, on Calabria's Tyrrhenian coast, a small church crowns a sandstone rock that was once entirely surrounded by the sea, which is why the place is still called the island. The pale facade, the central bell tower and the pinnacles stand against open water and sky, and a stairway cut into the rock around 1810 climbs from the beach to the church door.

The rock was a natural retreat. In the Middle Ages hermits and Byzantine monks lived here, and the church belonged for a long time to Basilian monks before Benedictines took over in the 11th century; the Norman duke Robert Guiscard moved it from the Greek to the Latin rite around 1060, and Santa Maria of Tropea appears among the possessions listed on the bronze door of the abbey of Montecassino. The building's origins are placed between the 6th and the 8th century. Its core was a square room ringed by a vaulted ambulatory, later enlarged into a three-aisled church with barrel vaults; the old tufa enclosure wall now forms an irregular fourth aisle set with fragments of tombstones. Earthquakes in 1783 and 1905 left little of the original structure, and after 1905 the church was given its present look: a symmetrical portico, the bell tower moved to the centre and decorative pinnacles on top.

An 18th-century sculpture of the Holy Family stands in the altar niche. On the feast of the Assumption it is carried out to sea on a decorated fishing boat, followed by a flotilla, along the coast between Zambrone and Capo Vaticano. Local tradition holds that a wooden statue of the Virgin arrived from the East in the age of Iconoclasm and proved too tall for its niche in the rock; when a carpenter set his saw to its legs his arms were paralysed, and the bishop and the mayor who had ordered the work died on the spot. Tropea itself, a town of about 5,700 people on the Gulf of Saint Euphemia, is known for its Norman cathedral, its old palaces and its beaches, and was named Italy's most beautiful village in 2021.

Getting there

The church stands on the shore directly below Tropea's historic centre. Vibo Valentia is about 18 km away. Tropea station lies on the old coastal route of the southern Tyrrhenian railway. The nearest airport is Lamezia Terme International Airport (SUF), about 40 km away.