S terminus of A3, on the toe of mainland Italy. Not to be confused with Reggio Emilia in the north. Gabriele d’Annunzio called its sea front the most beautiful kilometre in Italy – it is actually 10 km long, and on the railway which runs parallel with it there are no fewer than six stations. The most northerly is Villa San Giovanni, the train-ferry terminal for Messina in Sicily.

Reggio’s promenade, lined with tropical flora, has a tremendous outlook across the strait to the vast snowy bulk of Mount Etna (here known as Mongibello or ‘beautiful mountain’). The city is rightly proud of its national museum, where Calabria’s pre-history and the relics of Magna Graecia are imaginatively and immaculately displayed. Two gigantic Greek statues, recovered from the sea and brought to the museum in 1981, are dated to 450 BC.

The botanical gardens contain rubber, pepper, camphor and other unusual trees. A private garden at the south end of the town has aromatic shrubs and herbs. Here stands the Experimental Station of the Essences, visitable by appointment. In its laboratories the essential oils of citrus fruits and jasmines yield up their secrets. Unique among them is the bergamot, a hybrid fruit of indeterminate origin, a mongrel intruder in the orange and lemon orchards of old-time peasant farmers (probably a mixed marriage between a lime and an orange). It is now scientifically cultivated and is a big currency earner, its rind supplying the zest which ‘fixes’ all the best perfumes. Many lands, most recently Japan and the lvory Coast, have tried to set up rival bergamot gardens, but the fruit will flourish nowhere in the world outside a few miles of the Reggio shore.