You visit Policoro on the final full day of the tour. After a morning by the seaside, you have a seafood lunch overlooking the Ionian. It’s a moment to breathe — to sit where Greeks and Romans once sat, looking out at their sea, before returning to Torre Fiore for the farewell dinner.
This is a place filled with history. In 280 BC, Herakleia was the scene of one of the most famous battles of antiquity — when the Greek king Pyrrhus defeated the Roman army using war elephants, a weapon the Romans had never encountered. It was here, on this coastal plain, that the word “Pyrrhic victory” was born — a triumph so costly it contained the seeds of its own defeat.
