A golden cliff-top silhouette from far off, it is ‘Queen of Panoramas’ and city of three Vs: veluti (velvets), venti (winds) and Vitaliano (local saint). A resident likens it to a man in a handsome cloak with a dirty shirt underneath. Shoddy high-rise tenements overlook a Shanghai of packing-case and corned-beef-tin dwellings. Litter swirls in the updraught from the valley. The sights of this city of age-old corruption are the Cavatore or Miner’s Monument in front of the main-street Castello (dedicated, they say, to the man who actually discovered a trickle of clear water); Villa Trieste gardens, magnificent in spring with flowering trees; the train from Cosenza, engaging cogs for a precipitous descent to Catanzaro Marina; and a mish-mash of a cathedral, built in haste to replace a casualty of the Second World War.