Villages of Calabria

There is a Calabria that makes a postcard noise and one that speaks softly, and we look for the second. In Tropea we take you to the edge of the tufa cliff at the hour when the sun sets behind Stromboli, and as the village turns pink our tour leads point down there, on the islet, to 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 came ashore from the sea. Further on opens the Coast of the Gods, and someone will tell you, with a half-smile, that it was founded by Hercules himself. You half believe it, but you'll remember it forever.

In Scilla the myth becomes almost tangible. Before you the Strait, and somewhere in those currents Homer imagined Scylla, the nymph turned into a six-headed monster by the jealousy of the sorceress Circe, condemned to terrorise sailors across from Charybdis. Below the Ruffo castle huddles Chianalea, the fishermen's quarter: houses that fish straight into the water, boats moored to the doorsteps, alleys that seem like canals. Here the swordfish hunt is a rite centuries old, still carried out from the high gangways of the spadara boats, and in the evening you taste it in a sandwich eaten on the jetty, your feet almost in the wave.

Then there is Pizzo, perched on its spur over the Gulf of Sant'Eufemia. In the Aragonese castle, in 1815, Joachim 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 of Pizzo, born of pure improvisation when an ice-cream maker, left without moulds during a festival, began to shape balls of gelato by hand, hiding a heart of molten chocolate inside. A mistake become legend, today protected as a PGI.