The Calabria I Found

Crossing Calabria: A Journey Between Two Seas

When people picture Calabria, the first image that usually comes to mind is the sea. Calabria has almost 800 kilometers of coastline, touched by both the Tyrrhenian and Ionian seas. But perhaps what makes this region so extraordinary is not simply how much sea surrounds it. It is how quickly the landscape changes once you leave it behind. Drive inland and beaches disappear into hills, olive groves and small villages. Continue a little farther and, before you have quite adjusted to the new scenery, another stretch of blue appears on the horizon. Mountains, countryside and coastline coexist remarkably close to one another here. It means that a journey through Calabria can feel like several different journeys folded into one. That is exactly what we wanted to experience this summer.
We began on the Tyrrhenian Sea, in Pizzo Calabro, then slowly moved through the interior, Francavilla Angitola, San Floro and Roccelletta di Borgia, before finding the sea again around Squillace and Caminia, this time on the Ionian coast. It wasn't an itinerary built around checking famous places off a list. We wanted to follow the roads, meet the people who live along them and understand what still belongs specifically to this part of Italy.

The Costa degli Dei, preferably without a schedule

Pizzo is also a good place from which to explore the Costa degli Dei, the stretch of Tyrrhenian coastline running through the province of Vibo Valentia. Some of these beaches are becoming increasingly well known, and places that once felt almost secret are no longer quite so secret. Michelino Beach, near Parghelia, is one of the beautiful spots along this coastline, reached on foot through the rocky landscape. Farther south, around Zambrone, the coast breaks into small beaches and coves around places such as Paradiso del Sub. But one of my favourite ways to see this coast is from the water. From there you realise how many small bays and inlets are hidden between the rocks, places that are much harder to understand from a road or a map. And perhaps that slight difficulty is part of what has protected them. There is always a complicated conversation around places like these. We want people to discover them because they deserve to be known, but we also hope they will never be forced to change simply to accommodate more people.

Calabria does not need to become another version of somewhere else. The best kind of tourism here is the kind that arrives quietly: curious enough to explore, patient enough to understand the place, and respectful enough to leave it as beautiful as it was found. My ideal evening in this part of Calabria is still incredibly simple: find a beach, buy something good to eat, stay until sunset and look towards the Aeolian Islands as the light disappears.

Francavilla Angitola: a day with Nonna Caterina

From Pizzo, we left the coast and travelled inland to Francavilla Angitola. Only a short distance separates the sea from a completely different Calabria, vegetable gardens, country roads, houses surrounded by land and a rhythm of life still strongly tied to what grows during each season.

Here I spent the day with Nonna Caterina. We walked through her garden, gathered ingredients, cooked and eventually sat down together for lunch. But Caterina's story deserves more than a paragraph in a travel diary, so we decided to give her a film (and an article) entirely of her own. Because our day with her wasn't simply about learning a recipe. It was about learning how a generation of women became extraordinarily skilled at turning whatever the land gave them into something that could feed a family today, tomorrow, or months later. And so, after lunch, we continued east.

San Floro: looking backwards to build something new

One of the things I love most about travelling through Calabria is discovering stories that completely contradict the image you had in your head. Silk was one of them. Today, very few people outside the region would immediately associate Calabria with silk production. Yet around Catanzaro and villages including San Floro, Borgia, Cortale and Girifalco, sericulture was once part of a long local tradition. In San Floro, that history is being brought back to life by Nido di Seta.

The project began in 2014 and today works through the entire process in one place: growing mulberry trees, raising silkworms, extracting the thread, spinning it and weaving silk by hand. Walking through the mulberry grove with Miriam and Domenico, it slowly becomes clear that silk does not begin with something luxurious. It begins with a leaf. Then a silkworm. Then a cocoon. Then an almost impossibly fine thread. Watching each stage gives a completely different meaning to the finished fabric. But what interested me even more than the silk itself was the decision behind Nido di Seta. These are young people who chose to remain in Calabria and search inside their own territory for something worth rebuilding. There is a tendency to talk about tradition as though preserving it means refusing change. Here, it feels like exactly the opposite. They looked backwards in order to imagine something new.

Nido di Seta has taken a production that had almost disappeared and turned it into work, education and an experience that visitors can actually enter. Guided visits take you through the mulberry grove and the various stages of sericulture and weaving, allowing a nearly forgotten process to become tangible again. It was one of those encounters that reminds you that the future of small places does not always have to be invented from nothing, sometimes it is already there.

Roccelletta di Borgia: somewhere that felt like home

For this part of the journey, our base became Agriturismo Il Casolare in Roccelletta di Borgia. A stone farmhouse surrounded by green, olive trees and horses, it became one of those places where you arrive as a guest and very quickly stop feeling like one. I ate there, talked with the family, came back after long days of filming and slowly developed those little routines that make an unfamiliar place feel familiar.

Calabrian hospitality can be difficult to explain because often it is not expressed through spectacular gestures, it is food appearing in front of you, someone asking whether you have eaten, a conversation becoming longer than expected, a chair being added to a table without anyone making a big deal about it.

Squillace: a town shaped by hands

From Roccelletta, we travelled to Squillace, a hilltop town overlooking the Ionian side of Calabria. From the castle above the village, you can already see the sea waiting in the distance. But before heading back towards the coast, there was something else I wanted to understand. Ceramics. Squillace has one of Calabria's strongest ceramic traditions. Its relationship with pottery reaches back centuries, and the town is still home to workshops where artisans continue shaping and decorating pieces by hand. The distinctive local tradition includes graffito, in which designs are incised into the surface of the piece.

This is another thing Calabria does very well: hiding extraordinary people in places where you might never think to look for them. You walk down a narrow village street, open the door of a workshop and suddenly find someone carrying forward knowledge that has passed through generations. I watched clay spinning on the wheel and slowly becoming something recognisable under the hands of the artisan. There is something reassuring about that process, no shortcut, no hurry, just repetition, experience and touch. Travelling this way changes how you look at the objects around you. A bowl is no longer simply a bowl once you have watched a person make it.

Donna Lina: possibly the supermarket with the best view in Italy

After walking through Squillace, the sea was visible below us. And once you see the sea in Calabria in July, resisting it becomes fairly pointless. So we started driving towards the coast. But first: lunch. Along the road above the bay of Caminia we stopped somewhere I could never have planned into an itinerary properly, because describing it as a tourist attraction would completely miss the point.

Donna Lina is, technically, a supermarket. But it is also a tobacconist, a place to buy a football, sunscreen, detergent or a beer, somewhere to make a sandwich exactly how you want it and, most importantly, somewhere to eat that sandwich on a tiny balcony overlooking one of the most beautiful stretches of the Ionian coast. Donna Lina founded the place, and today her daughter and granddaughter continue it. I ordered a sandwich with peppers, aubergines and caciocavallo, and another with prosciutto crudo, mozzarella and tomato. No elaborate menu. No reinterpretation. No ingredient introduced by a five-minute speech. Just very good things between two pieces of bread, eaten while looking at the sea. And perhaps that lunch captured something I had been trying to understand throughout the trip.

Calabria is beautiful not because everything is perfect. Quite the opposite. There is still something wonderfully unpolished about it. Not everything has been redesigned, repackaged or made to resemble the same places you can find in every other tourist destination. It still has edges, and personality lives in the edges.

The Ionian coast and an Italian summer we still remember
At Lido Ulisse, I felt something I hadn't expected: nostalgia for a summer that had never really disappeared. A foosball table, children under umbrellas, packaged ice creams, plastic beach toys. The little machines that give you a ball or a toy after you put a coin inside. Families arriving with bags containing everything they could possibly need for an entire day. Nothing particularly extraordinary and yet, somehow, increasingly rare. It reminded me of the summers many of us grew up with in Italy, when your mother told you not to swim too far, lunch seemed to last forever, your feet were permanently covered in sand and the greatest decisions of the day involved which ice cream to choose. In many places nostalgia is something people now manufacture. Vintage signs are reproduced. Interiors are deliberately aged. Businesses try to recreate a past that disappeared decades ago. Here nobody is recreating it, some of it simply never left. And there is something deeply comforting about being able to walk back into a feeling you thought existed only in your memory. That may be one of the strangest things about Calabria, it can make you nostalgic and happy at exactly the same time.

You don't need a checklist for Calabria

We only crossed a small part of Calabria, and there is still so much we haven't seen. Maybe that is exactly how this region should be discovered: not trying to see everything, but choosing one area, leaving some space in the plan, following a road, asking questions, stopping when something catches your attention. Calabria does not always reveal itself immediately. Some of its most beautiful places are hidden, imperfect, sometimes a little difficult to reach. But that is also what makes discovering them feel real. In just a few days we went from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Ionian coast, through gardens, silk, ceramics, small family businesses and places that still feel untouched by the need to become something else. Calabria doesn't need to change its identity to be loved. It needs to be protected. Come here with curiosity, without too many expectations, and give yourself time to discover it. One trip will probably not be enough.