Villages of Calabria

There is a Calabria that rattles like a postcard and one that speaks in a low voice, and we go looking for the second. In Tropea we take you to the edge of the tufa cliff at the hour when the sun drops behind Stromboli, and as the village turns pink our tour leads point out, down below on the little island, the sanctuary of Santa Maria dell'Isola: a Benedictine monastery clinging to the rock, where legend has it that a wooden statue of the Madonna arrived from the sea. Further along, the Costa degli Dei opens up, and someone will tell you, with a half-smile, that it was Hercules himself who founded it. You half believe it, but you will remember it forever.

In Scilla the myth becomes almost tangible. Before you lies the Strait, and somewhere in those currents Homer imagined Scylla, the nymph transformed into a six-headed monster by the jealousy of the sorceress Circe, condemned to terrorise sailors opposite Charybdis. Beneath the Castello dei Ruffo, Chianalea draws close — the fishermen's quarter: houses that fish directly from the water, boats tied to doorways, alleyways that look like canals. Here swordfish hunting is a ritual centuries old, still carried out from the high walkways of the spadara boats, and in the evening you taste it in a sandwich eaten on the pier, with your feet almost in the wave.

Then there is Pizzo, perched on its spur overlooking the Gulf of Sant'Eufemia. In the Aragonese castle, in 1815, Gioacchino Murat — Napoleon's brother-in-law and King of Naples — was imprisoned and shot: a story our tour leads tell in the very rooms where it happened. And then the sweet: the Tartufo di Pizzo, born of pure improvisation when a gelato maker, left without moulds during a festival, began shaping the balls of ice cream by hand, hiding inside them a heart of melted chocolate. A mistake that became legend, today protected as a PGI.