Favorite towns in Southern Italy

We drove from Rome to Palermo & back in late Feb/early Mar 2018. It was a great trip. Car is far more practical than train to / around Sicily. The roads in the south are fairly new & decent, as is the highway along the northern coast.

My favorite towns in the south, on the way to Sicily:
--Paestum, home to water buffalo dairy farms & thus buffalo milk mozzarella, and some of the best preserved Greek temples on earth. Has a decent small museum on the Greek era in Paestum. The Tenuta Duca Mariglianois a nice boutique hotel on the edge of town, with a great restaurant on site. Paestum hosts an artichoke festival each year (not sure of dates).

--Maratea, perched on the mountainside above the sea. It's a resort-ish town for Italians and Europeans, with very few Americans. Not overrun by mass tourism, with not a bus in sight. It still feels like a "real" place, as opposed to a stage set. Huge statute of Christ atop the mountain overlooking town.

Driving south takes you through a long and fairly remote (extremely remote, by Italian standards) stretch of roadway with few towns, lots of rocky mountain scenery, and dramatic changes in temperature/weather as you weave in and out of the valleys. We stopped for fuel in one little borgo & encountered an elderly gas station attendant who'd never seen a cocker spaniel & was thrilled to meet the dog. (Honestly, it was like being in rural Appalachia, felt very remote and "agrigosto"/terrone.)

Reggio Calabria, the biggest city in the south, is not so gorgeous, but it's an interesting experience to cross the straits of Messina (between the Scylla and Charybdis) on the car ferry. It's about 25 minutes across, just long enough to get out of your car and go upstairs to get a coffee, gelato, or arancino in the snack bar.

Messina, where you get off the ferry, is a generic feeling postwar European city....but Sicily itself deserves an entirely separate post.