The Museo Nazionale della Magna Grecia is the reason people come to Reggio di Calabria, and it deserves every superlative. The museum holds one of the finest collections of ancient Greek art in the world — pottery, sculpture, coins, jewellery, and architectural fragments from the Greek colonies of southern Italy — but everything else is secondary to the Riace Bronzes, housed in their own specially controlled room on the ground floor.
The two bronzes are full-sized male figures, naked warriors in the classical tradition, cast in bronze with extraordinary technical mastery around 460–450 BC. Standing before them is one of those experiences that the word "museum" barely prepares you for: they are not archaeological artefacts, they are people, and they face you with an intensity that makes the rest of the room disappear. The museum building itself is a stately early twentieth-century palazzo designed by Marcello Piacentini. Allow at least two hours, more if you want to do justice to the rest of the Greek colonial collection.