| | | Want beaches, cliffs, a beehive town? Head south |
| You don't hear much about Calabrian tourism, but it has some of Italy's most beautiful mountains, ringed by white-sand beaches. It's the toe of the Italian boot, and it kicks.
I was visiting Italy's deep south to research a guidebook. Also on my itinerary were Puglia, the much-hyped heel, with its cute witch's-hat farmhouses, sunbathed beaches and glorious food, and Basilicata, the wild, mountainous region north of Calabria that's home to Matera, where Mel Gibson chose to film "The Passion of the Christ."
I knew of Puglia and Basilicata's many charms. But Calabria? That was a great unknown. By the end of my trip, I was hooked.
Calabria has three national parks, each distinctive. Pollino has craggy mountains, how-did-they-get-here villages and the rollicking river Lao, where you can go white-water rafting. South of Pollino is Alpine-esque La Sila, with mammoth wooded hills cut through by roads-on-stilts. From here you can leave a ski resort and be at the beach in half an hour.
Aspromonte, where the local Mafia 'Ndrangheta hid its kidnapping victims in the 1970s and 1980s, demanding huge ransoms from rich northern families, is most spectacular of all, with vast mountains swathed in mist, tall forests and dramatic villages resembling heaps of scattered rocks.
I started my journey south of Pollino and north of La Sila, stopping at the town of Cosenza. I had to
battle traffic and unwelcoming suburbs to reach the historic center. Modern development in Calabria means many towns have spilled across the countryside unfetchingly, but within this shell was a higgledy-piggledy medieval town. The back-in-time streets were pretty, yet not prettified, with a bewitching touch of the Wild West in the dilapidated shop fronts.
I drove back through Pollino, Italy's largest national park, to reach one of Italy's most extraordinary towns, Matera. You can see why Mel Gibson chose it to portray the epic landscape of Christ's death: It's built over caves that pock the hillside, above a dramatic, dangerously steep gorge.
The town's buildings are elegant - it was wealthy in medieval times, and it is again today - but in the early 20th century the poor lived in caves alongside livestock, and children would follow visitors, begging for quinine to treat the endemic malaria. The slum-caves were cleaned up in the 1950s. Today it's a UNESCO World Heritage site, and tourists and film crews come in droves. Ironically, some of the caves now contain the region's swankiest hotels.
Next was Maratea, on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Its vertiginous cliffs, pastel-colored villages and mountains swooping down to a teal sea made it feel like a smaller, less-discovered Amalfi coast. I drove up to the huge clifftop Christ statue dominating the bay and was rewarded by a rare top-of-the-world rush upon reaching the summit.
Spring is the sweetest time to visit Puglia, when the weather warms and the fields disappear under a tangle of wild flowers. Lecce, in the south of the region, is a graceful university town carved out of golden stone. I'd never seen its baroque carvings anywhere: hallucinogenic gargoyles looking more "Alice in Wonderland" than the Catholic tradition.
Southeast is Gallipoli, a town filling a coastal island. Wandering in the center I passed lively gatherings of behatted elderly gents and glimpsed card games played on oilcloths in front rooms. Elderly ladies preferred congregating outside their houses, on plastic chairs.
Many visit Puglia for its beaches: Caribbean-style powder-white sands meeting dusky sea. It feels like the whole of Italy is here come August, but in spring, there are hardly any other visitors. Silly them.
Besides beaches, Puglia beckons with its gastronomic charms: olive oil, wine and pasta, market-fresh fruits and veggies, mozzarella made fresh that morning.
But Puglia might be most famous for its trulli, weird cone-shape farmhouses resembling beehives. The best place to see these is Alberobello: a whole town of beehives. Visiting at dusk, I half-expected to see gnomes popping out to water their window boxes.
Getting there:
* Fly to London, Rome or Milan, then take a no-frills easyJet, Ryanair or Blu-express flight to Reggio, Bari or Brindisi.
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