The parent city was Tauriana , on the plateau to the north-east, and its territory produced San Fantino il Vecchio , the oldest saint of Calabria; the crypt of San Fantino beneath the complex there is the oldest Christian place of worship in the region.

In 951 Tauriana was destroyed by the forces of the emir of Palermo, Hasan Ibn Alì . Fleeing, the part of the population engaged in trade and seafaring settled on the upper part of the coast between Monte Aulinas and the Metauros , in the contrada called De Palmis — named for the palms that grew there, and still the town's emblem. Before that there had been only a few farmhouses.

The early village is thinly documented. In 1061 Roger I, that year made count of Calabria, disposed of the lands of destroyed Tauriana, granting to the church of Santa Maria and the Twelve Apostles of Bagnara "San Georgium da Palmis with its appurtenances and lands." In 1086 he attached the abandoned diocesan territory of Tauriana to the new diocese of Mileto . Tradition holds that Roger assembled the Norman army at Palmi for the conquest of Sicily. Into the thirteenth century the only news concerns the convents of Sant'Elia lo Juniore and San Fantino ; in the fourteenth the settlement was small enough that San Nicola was its only church.

Seminara, the sole town of the district standing away from the sea, exercised jurisdiction over these depopulated contrade, and Palmi was its casale . In 1495 Ferdinand II of Aragon took refuge here after his defeat at Seminara by d'Aubigny. In 1549 a Saracen incursion destroyed the town, and the feudal lord Duke Carlo Spinelli rebuilt and fortified it, giving it for a time the name Carlopoli and ringing the coast with watchtowers. The town grew on that security, drawing the maritime trade of the southern Calabrian coasts.

It became independent of Seminara in 1632 . In 1636 the Court of Naples ceded it to the marquis of Arena; from 1684 it belonged again to the Spinelli. A fair established by the feudatory Andrea Concublet drove its seventeenth-century commercial expansion. The abate Pacichelli, writing in 1693, described it among mulberries, olives and orchards, with a perfectly square piazza full of shops and a theatre for comedies.

The eighteenth century was Palmi's most prosperous — until 1783 , when the great Calabrian earthquake destroyed the town completely and killed around 1,400 people. Reconstruction followed, partly on a plan drawn by the engineer De Cosiron . In 1806 , under French rule, Palmi was made a district capital. In 1860 Garibaldi landed at the Marina di Palmi, and the substantial Bourbon garrison fled. After unification the district was abolished and Palmi was made head of its own circondario , which lasted until 1927 .

The ground did not settle. In 1894 Palmi was the epicentre of an earthquake that caused extensive ruin and nine deaths, and in 1908 it was destroyed almost entirely by the great Messina-Reggio earthquake. The modern town, with its Liberty buildings and its twentieth-century Duomo, is the product of that last rebuilding.

Palmi produced the writer Leonida Repàci and the composer Manfroce , whose bust by Vincenzo Jerace stands in the public gardens.