Locri Epizefiri was founded around 680 BC by Locrians from Greece, first at the promontory of Zephyrion north of Capo Spartivento, then — after a few years — some twenty kilometres further north on the hill of Epopis. The settlers kept the name Lokroi hoi Epizephyrioi , the Locrians under the west wind, to distinguish themselves from the Locrians of the homeland. The coast they took was the last stretch of southern Italy still available, and the people already there were, by the sources and by the excavations, a warlike population.

The city became one of the most consequential in the Greek west. The lawgiver Zaleucus is credited with producing the first written law code of the western world here — severe but just — and Plato called Locri the flower of Italy. Its terracotta workshops were among the finest anywhere: the pinakes , votive relief tablets, are the signature product, and a great deposit of them was recovered in Paolo Orsi's campaigns of 1908–09 , now at the museum of Syracuse, while the older Candida collection formed at Gerace went to Taranto.

It reached its height in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, sided with Syracuse against Rhegion, endured the tyranny of Dionysius II , received a Roman garrison in 282 BC , allied with Carthage and was stormed by Scipio . After that it declined. Reduced to a modest settlement, it was assaulted and destroyed by Saracen raiders around the seventh century AD, and its people abandoned the site.

Where they went is the point. They withdrew inland and uphill, to the safer height where Gerace rose. Between roughly the seventh century and the nineteenth, this coast was substantially empty — raiding and, later, malaria kept people off it. For more than a thousand years the population of this district lived in the hills, and the shore was a place you went to work, not to live.

The return began in the nineteenth century, and the decisive event was infrastructure: the building of the Ionian railway in the second half of the century. A coastal village of Gerace grew into a real town on the strength of it, acquired an economic and social identity distinct from the hill town above, and in 1905 was made an autonomous comune under the name Gerace Marina . By the early twentieth century the name no longer matched the reality: the inhabitants had begun to identify with their own town and with the classical past beneath it rather than with the comune they had separated from. In 1934 the name was changed to Locri .

The town is now the centre of the Locride, with the Museo Archeologico Nazionale and the archaeological park, the Ionic temple of Marasà — rebuilt in the first half of the fifth century BC over an archaic predecessor — and a Greek-Roman theatre. Its monuments include one to Nosside , the Locrian poetess, and one to the Five Martyrs of Gerace.