The name comes through Latin Scylla from Greek Skylla , and the monster of the Strait is the rock itself. The first fortification of it dates to the beginning of the fifth century BC , under the tyranny of Anaxilas , as a control point on the Tyrrhenian and a defence against pirates. Pliny the Elder calls the place Oppidum Scyllaeum — oppidum being the Latin for a large fortified settlement.

It held off Carthaginians and Bruttii in the third century BC, when it already had the shape of a genuine fortress, and it resisted the Saracen incursions of the ninth century. To that period belongs another foundation: historians attribute the monastery and church of San Pancrazio to the first Basilian monks, between the eighth and ninth centuries, fortified at the wish of Byzantium, which had charged the Fathers with defending the coasts of the Strait.

In the Norman period the castle was besieged and starved into surrender by Robert Guiscard . It was enlarged and enriched afterward by Charles I of Anjou and later by Ferdinand I of Naples .

In the first half of the sixteenth century — sources give 1533 and 1546 — it was bought by Paolo Ruffo , who converted the austere military stronghold into a noble residence, commissioned the restoration of the baronial palace and set the family arms over the entrance arch. The Ruffo took the title of princes here, and the castle enjoyed two prosperous centuries. In 1720 the Austrians fortified it against the Spanish.

Then 5 February 1783 . The great Calabrian earthquake, accompanied here by a tsunami , devastated the town. It is the watershed of Scilla's history, not only for the violence of the event but because it ended the economic growth the town had enjoyed through the whole eighteenth century. The castle became state property in 1808 and was restored in 1810 ; after the Napoleonic interval, the returning Bourbons established an urban guard at Scilla in 1827 .

Exactly a hundred and twenty-five years after the first, the earthquake of 28 December 1908 cost Scilla, and Messina across the water, thousands of dead. It destroyed much of the ancient structure of the castle. In 1913 the upper part was closed off to house the lighthouse of the Marina Militare, which is still there. Under Fascism some of the rooms were divided into flats for public employees, which damaged further what remained; for the last decades of the twentieth century the building served as a youth hostel; and after a recent restoration it has become a cultural centre, home to the regional centre for the recovery of Calabrian historic towns.

The Chiesa della Santissima Immacolata , the matrice , stands near the castle on the promontory. Its first building was very old, but it has been rebuilt repeatedly after the earthquakes; the present structure dates from the 1970s and was artistically completed only at the end of the 1990s. Chianalea keeps the eighteenth-century Santa Maria di Porto Salvo and the older San Giuseppe , along with Palazzo Scategna at the Scalo Araggio where fishermen have sheltered their boats for centuries, Palazzo Giordani of 1543 , and a fourteenth-century Casa Ruffo .