The origins are ancient, confused between mythology, history, legend and poetic images fed for millennia by the evocativeness of the natural environment.

Pausanias (grammarian of Caesarea), tells that Scylla was the daughter of Nisus, king of Megara. The princess helped King Minos against her own father and allowed him to conquer lands under his rule. The victor then not only refused to marry her, but abandoned her to the waves of the sea, who carried her body, of Greek workmanship, at the foot of the promontory which was given the name of the vague unhappy girl:
it is located 12 miles from Messina, along the Febaean coast. » According to Palifate, Polybius and Strabo, the first inhabited nucleus of Scylla dates back to the time of the Trojan War. In this remote era it is customary to recognize in the Italian peninsula waves of migrations of Ibero Ligurian populations coming from the sea and heading south. It is therefore believed that these populations may have founded some villages along the lower terraces of the southwestern Aspromonte ridge, sloping towards the Strait. Being people of fishermen, they presumably chose as settlement area the site adjacent to the central cliff of Scilla, where the presence of the numerous rocks facilitated the practice of fishing, while allowing the construction of rudimentary huts.

This hypothesis is partly supported by Homer himself when, in describing Crataia as the mother of Scylla, he suggests the existence of a close link between this and the birth of the myth of the Monstruum Scylaeum, to be understood even arose at the first human attendance of the stretch of sea in front of today’s town. Since Crataia is identified with the nearby stream Favazzina, still at the time of the Barrio called the river of fish, it could be deduced that groups of people engaged in fishing, arrived by sea along the low Tyrrhenian coast, at the mouth of this river.

The oldest village of Scilla is Chianalea and its name derives from "piano della galea", but it is also called Acquagrande or Canalea, because the small houses that rise directly on the rocks are separated from each other by small streets, similar to canals, which descend directly into the Tyrrhenian Sea.

In the absence of previous reliable evidence about the most remote eras, it is likely to date the first fortification of Scylla to the beginning of the fifth century BC, when during the tyranny of Anaxilaus the city of Reggio reached a considerable importance, that allowed it to hinder for over two centuries the rise of rival powers.

Strabo recounts that in 493 B.C. the tyrant of Reggio, Anassila the young, to put an end to the repeated raids perpetrated by the Tyrrhenian pirates against the trades opened by the city with the Tyrrhenian colonies, had moved against them with a strong army, defeating and driving away pirates from these lands. For the Tirreni the countless rocks and the high rock characterizing the Scillese coast were an ideal natural refuge, inaccessible place from which to direct profitable raids along the coasts, safe hiding place for the loot and bulwark of defense against any enemy counterattacks.

It was presumably that quarrels and strife arose between the first sailors and fishermen who had occupied the area and the Tyrrhenian pirates, to whose belligerence it is perhaps attributable the cause of the withdrawal from the sea of the fishermen, hindered by pirates in the practice on which they based their livelihood. This would explain the transfer of residence to the upper area of Scilla the current district of San Giorgio implemented by these seafaring people, who are transformed into farmers and hunters and then keep active new practices until the modern age.

Experts in navigation, the Tyrrhenians had long dominated the routes of the Mediterranean, exerting their dominance especially in the Strait, thanks to the garrison placed on the cliff scillese, the mouth of the canal, presumably fortified. Later, however, they were defeated by Reggio, a victory that marks a significant moment in the history of Scylla, considered by Anassila an important outpost of control on maritime routes. While he secured dominion over the surrounding area by incorporating a new section of the Chersoneso Reggino, at the same time Anassila took care to build a "ship station" in Punta Pacì, ordering the construction of a port with a fierce military garrison.

The work of fortification of the high rock was completed by the successive tyrants of Reggio, often engaged in clashes with pirates who fight using the fortified port built specifically for Monacena, towards Punta Pacì, in a place inaccessible from the side opposite the rock. Bulwark of the safety of the Reggini, the fortification of Scilla with landing place is of fundamental importance to the effects of the happy outcome of the war against piracy, allowing the tyrants of Reggio to oppose for a long time a valid resistance against the attacks of new enemies and against the continuous attempts of revenge of the defeated Tirreni.

At the beginning of the third century BC, after the capture of Reggio by the tyrant of Syracuse Dionysius I, who in 386 B.C. had destroyed the naval fleet of the city stationed in Lipari and in the port of Scilla, The Tyrrhenian pirates returned to be bold and returned to the Scillese promontory, where they resumed to engage in piracy using the pre-existing fortified port until, in 344 BC, the brave Timoleonte of Corinth finally defeated them.
As for the subsequent history of the fortification of the imposing rock of Scilla, there is evidence of how it coincides with the history of the events that characterized the Reggio area in the aftermath of the tyranny of Syracuse. In the late Magno-Greek age the Scillese rock is a fortress, known as Oppidum Scyllaeum, later strengthened in its military structures during the Roman era, when port and oppidum constitute a functional and efficient defense system for the new rulers of the Mediterranean.

At the end of the second century BC, during the wars conducted by the Romans against the Tarantini supported by Pyrrhus, and in particular during the first and second Punic Wars, the Carthaginians who had formed an alliance with the Bretts and circulated freely along the coasts of Reggio, were stopped in their ascent thanks to the strenuous resistance opposed to them by the fortified city of Scilla, ally of Rome.
The importance of the Latin Scilla began to decline in the aftermath of the Roman conquest of the Sicilian lands when, after Reggio and Syracuse, Messina became the new stronghold for the control of the Strait.

However, Scylla, located at the northern entrance of the canal, continued to be an important landing stage along the continental Tyrrhenian coast, so much so that in 73 BC, during the war waged by the Romans against slaves, the town seems to have been chosen by Spartacus, at the head of the rebels, to camp waiting to cross the Strait.
The escape to Sicily, planned by the rebellious slaves with the use of rafts built with chestnut wood extracted from the scillesi woods, however, had no result because of the presence along the Strait of the threatening Pompeian ships. Subsequently the stretch of sea in front of the town was the scene of the events that marked the last clash between Pompey and the year of the Triunviris, ended in 42 B.C. with the defeat of the first.

At that juncture the port of Scylla offered appropriate shelter to the ships of Octavian pressed by the fleet of Pompey, when the future Augustus, in an attempt to postpone the final clash to a more propitious moment to him, grasped the strategic importance of Scylla and, Once he finally got rid of his rivals, he decreed the further fortification of his port.
After Ottaviano it does not seem that the Scillese fortification has seen new changes, although the town continues to hold the important role of local maritime center, as evidenced by Saint Jerome when, When he arrived in 385 in Scylla during his journey to Jerusalem, he left us testimony in the third book of his works, about the great experience of the Scilles sailors, able to give him very useful advice for the good continuation of navigation.
The state of neglect in which the fortress of Scilla seems to be located in the late Roman Age, presumably, depends on locating the same outside the terrestrial routes traveled by the barbarians, during their invasions in the south of the peninsula. They, in fact, in their "descent" to the south, use the Roman roads that remained accessible in that period of decline. Scilla, which was not connected to the Via Popilia, the only existing consular road along the Tyrrhenian coast, therefore remains unrelated to the essential facts of the time.
In fact, the Via Consolare Popilia, in the southernmost part of its route did not border the coast, but went inland through Solano and, after passing the Grotte di Tremusa, reached the statio at the Piani della Melia, then heading towards Cannitello, «to Fretum»without falling back to Scylla. To the first Basilian monks, historians attribute the foundation of the Monastery and the church of San Pancrazio, between the eighth and ninth centuries AD, fortified by the will of Byzantium, which had entrusted the Fathers with the task of defending the coasts of the Strait.
The earthquake of 1783 represents an important watershed in the history of Scylla for the particularity with which it struck the town and also because it represented the end of an economic development that Scylla had throughout the eighteenth century.