WHEN MY WIFE, MARTHA, AND I VISITED Calabria for our first anniversary, Zia Saveria took us to the beach at Soverato, just south of Catanzaro on the Ionian Sea. Zia Saveria, Zia Angela’s sister, is the crazy aunt, the relative guaranteed to show you a great, if unpredictable, time. By the time we reached the ocean, we Were exhausted from Saveria’s wild shortcuts and fast driving in her Suzuki Samurai and were anxious to jump in.Heads turned to Martha and me as we cut a path across the white sand to the water. I should say, they all stared at my wife, who has light hair and light skin. We laid out our blankets on the sand. A woman sitting a few feet away hurried up to Martha and offered La Bianca an umbrella; another woman trotted up to Martha proffering a straw hat. Zia Saveria helped Martha rub number forty-five sunblock over her shoulders.
Myself, I decided to forgo sunblock, explaining to Martha that being Italian with a Mediterranean complexion and having grown up in Florida, I of course would only tan. But I had underestimated
the Calabrese sun—and the paling effect of seven years in New York City. My skin turned pink in minutes.
To cool off, I waded into the water, which was colder than I had expected it to be. Then I dived in. As I was surfacing, I felt my wedding ring slip off my finger. I opened my eyes and watched as it twirled down. I tried swimming after it but lost it in the sand.
I came up looking very upset. A small kid swimming next to me asked, “Che è successo?” When I told him what had happened, he summoned all his friends with their snorkels and masks—seven in all—and they went exploring.
“What happened?” asked Martha, who looked like a mummy all rolled in white cotton—with stray smears of cream around her face.
I took a deep breath. “My wedding ring … it slipped off my finger.”
“On our anniversary?” Martha said, and, realizing the irony, began to laugh. “Oh, no,” she said, feeling worse for me than for the lost ring.
I told Zia Saveria. She stood up and exclaimed, “That’s good luck. Now you will have to return!” Then she walked over to Martha and grabbed her finger. “Now you will throw yours in so they can be joined forever!” Zia Saveria laughed and kissed her on the cheek.
Now Giuseppe and I left Catanzaro along the same route that Zia Saveria had taken to the beach, then headed north along the two-lane coastal road.
Ten minutes in, Giuseppe brought the car to a screeching stop—from about sixty-five miles an hour. In front of us, an old woman dressed in black had stopped traffic in both lanes. She angrily looked at the drivers, then turned to the side of the road and gave the all-clear to what must have been her husband in a green three-wheeled APE. The man frowned at his wife, taxied out into the road, barely stopped to pick up his wife, and continued across.
For about forty-five minutes, we followed the coast north. To
our left, or northwest, tiny ancient villages dotted the hills, surrounded by eucalyptus trees, and below them olive trees in neat rows. To our right, newer apartment buildings, restaurants, and the occasional strip of stores lined the ocean road.
“Everyone has moved from the mountains to the ocean, where they can make more money from tourists,” Giuseppe told me in Botricello, turning left onto a road that led up to the mountains. While centuries ago villages like Taverna moved to the mountains for safety, now, in order to survive economically, they move to the ocean to cash in. They give their villages suffixes like Marina or Lido. Older folks remain in the mountain villages, while their sons and daughters settle along the sea.
We veered off along the foothills and coasted into a tiny part of the village just slightly up the cliff called Botricello Superiore. An eroded concrete sidewalk lined the sandy road, scarred with cracks and broken up by weeds. In this village, which once counted nine hundred inhabitants, there was not a single car. The shutters of all the houses had been nailed closed.
Cats peeked out of corners and crept toward Giuseppe’s car: one, then three, then seven, all crouching, skinny and haggard, their fur poking out in rough tufts. Suddenly dogs appeared from every corner and overtook the cats, which scattered back to their holes, then paused in exactly the same places as the feline predators, their mouths hanging open.
In a courtyard I spotted a clothesline. “Someone must live here,” I said to Giuseppe.
“There are only about four families who still do. Women and old men. They are the last; they still fight the flight to the coast. This is where they and their parents and grandparents all grew up,” he explained.
Only a cat’s mew could be heard, as the dust and debris blew along the alleys.
“They wait here now for their sons and daughters to return from the north,” Giuseppe added. Like the more prosperous coastal villages, Botricello feels the footsteps and voices of its sons and daughters, smells the comforting spicy food only two months out of the
year. By keeping their primary residences in the south, many are able to receive government subsidy grants. Some don’t want to lose their ancestral homes, but most couldn’t sell them if they tried.
Isola di Capo Rizzuto is not an island, but a village on a relatively flat peninsula on the ball of Italy’s foot. This stretch of land and the valley of Lamezia Terme on the Tyrrhenian Sea offer Calabria’s only notable flat surfaces. As you gaze off the coast, you see a spot of calm in the turbulent sea and picture the mythical island Ogygia, where Odysseus landed and for seven years lived with the “wily Calypso, of the fair braids, a dread goddess. With her no one has intercourse, either of gods or of mortal men.” She’s a Calabrese father’s dream daughter.
This part of Calabria became a port for Greeks, Aragonese, and Normans; during the post—World War II land reclamation, it was inhabited mostly by contadini, or peasants. In the 1970s, when those same peasants realized that they could successfully tap into the Italian tourism industry, they gradually built hotels and restaurants.
On one outcropping of the peninsula lies the frazione of Le Castella, the only elevation in an otherwise flat, nearly treeless part of the peninsula. We entered the hamlet by way of a narrow two-lane road. Faded yellow nineteenth-century buildings abutted stores and houses built in the 1970s, which seemed to have deteriorated at a much faster pace, as if to match their older neighbors. They were stuccoed like the older ones, but where the stucco had chipped, you could see the reinforced concrete. Few people gathered outside.
The closer to the water we got, the larger the stores became; windows offered views of shelves packed with beach blankets, towels, umbrellas, and souvenirs. I spotted rows of carved wooden statues of nineteenth-century Calabrese contadini, men with muzzled rifles at their sides or pistols in their belts and “La Mafia” written at their feet.
Though it was April and the town was deserted, Le Castella reminded me of coastal villages in Florida, like Tarpon Springs and Panama City, which cater to tourists from south of the Mason-Dixon
Line. Likewise, in July and August the beaches are populated almost exclusively by Italians—some who come down from the mountains, but mostly those who have moved north for work and return home on holiday.
The road ends at a piazza, which faces the castle island for which the town, Le Castella, is named. The castle was built by the Aragonese between 1510 and 1545, but its main tower is purported to have been first constructed by Hannibal during the Second Punic War, which lasted from 218 to 201 B.C. Once a strong defense against intruders and pirates, the castle feels more like a tourist playground.
Here at this piazza were the first signs of life—workers who had started construction and cleaning for the tourist season. Bulldozers were widening the streets, stucco artisans were reworking store facades, and carpenters were putting additions onto remodeled restaurants. Just workers, no passersby, no ladies buying produce, no produce stands. Two roads led to the castle, which could then be reached only by a footbridge.
The air was cold, but the sky was clear blue—perfect lighting for the castle. Giuseppe took out his camera and tripod from the trunk and backed away in order to get a clear shot.
“This postcard will be beautiful,” he called out to me.
At one time the entire towns, was villages by the walls of the fortress. Mounds of rubble and stone now mark the boundaries. Like North Florida coastal towns, these villages were scarcely inhabited as recently as thirty years ago. Now they have become alternative destinations, out of the way of the conoscenti, but a find for the locals and those looking for isolation. The village would swell for two months out of the year and then, like Panama City, would all but close.
Giuseppe needed to call on a client in the village of Capo Rizzuto, another outcropping on the peninsula. From here you can see Le Castella, but because Capo Rizzuto was farther from this tourist sight, if only about five miles, and empty of decent beaches, the region’s namesake was small and slightly shabby.
“A man was gunned down here a couple of months ago,” Giuseppe said. “It’s dangerous, but only for locals.”
Young men lingered on the edges of the piazza; whenever someone walked by, they looked up and with curious eyes followed the passerby, all the while keeping their conversation flowing. I wondered, had my grandparents never left—had I grown up here—would I have filled my days passa tempo, passing time?
The streets are wider here than in Le Castella; people actually live here. Farmers mostly, some fishermen; some make the half-hour drive to the textile factories and electrical companies, such as Montedison, near Crotone.
The smell of baking bread filled the village.
When Giuseppe was done, we walked along through an alleyway at the end of the piazza, which took us to the outskirts of the city. We passed by the village’s church, which was constructed from light clay-colored stone. Brick-size blocks of this stone were laid out in front of the church. Bricklayers were at work mending damaged parts of the wall.
Giuseppe got the foreman’s attention. “May I pick one up?” he asked.
The foreman looked at Giuseppe and with a formality that lent a seriousness to the situation said, “Yes, of course.”
Giuseppe picked up the stone and explained that this was tufa (tufo in Italian), a hard, though porous, rock that was the foundation of most coastal Calabrese villages. Tufa, which feels like coral but is almost as light as pumice, lines the entire coast and is sandwiched between layers of clay and rock; all the buildings, including Le Castella, were made of it. It’s usually found just below several feet of earth, and its hardness makes it expensive to cut. The workers were following the centuries-old tradition of cementing each brick with clay.
A flutter of wings broke through the dull, rhythmic sound of mallets lightly tapping the tufa in place; pigeons and sparrows burst from the church belfry above to the roofs of the surrounding buildings.