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Palmi	Capo Rizzuto	Tropea	Catanzaro	Crotone
ReggioCalabria	ViboValentia	Cosenza	Lamezia Terme	Roccella Jonica
Amantea	Bianco	Gioia Tauro	Gioiosa Ionica	Locri
Villasangiovanni	Soverato	Siderno

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Calabria Travel Guide Edit This The best resource for sights, hotels, restaurants, bars, what to do and see The beach in Guardavale Marina The beach in Guardavale Marina Jeff Calabria is a place for two types of people: Calabrians (calabresi) and adventurers. It is bewildering, even frightening to all others, but richly rewarding for those who want to go beyond the Hollywood stereotype of Italy. You will find no Florences or Venices in Calabria. You won't even find a San Gimignano or a Positano (Although Tropea comes close!). Art treasures are often encountered in remote villages. There's a spectacular seacoast with a mix of resorts, seacoast villages (many seemingly "hanging" on the edge of cliffs), and expansive beaches. Calabria , known as Brutium in Roman times, is a region in southern Italy which occupies the "toe" of the Italian peninsula south of Naples . It is bounded in to the west by the Tyrrhenian Sea , and to the east by the Ionian Sea . The island of Sicily is across the Strait of Messina and is not connected to the mainland. What else you will find in Calabria? Unforgettable vistas across rugged mountains, vast golden wheat fields and crystal clear seas. Age-old olive trees that grow as tall as eucalyptus. Ancient Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Norman ruins, forgotten by time, which suddenly loom over the horizon, beckoning you to your own private rendezvous with history. Shy but hospitable villagers who still wear voluminous black skirts or colorful traditional costumes. Delicious fish, vegetables, cheese, sausage, salami, wild mushrooms and figs. If you venture inland, you'll step back into time... this is not the modern stylish Italy we all know and love. You are in the mezzogiorno and you will see a world that is both mediterranean and traditional. You'll drive past countless roadside fountains dispensing natural mineral water. Take your place in line to fill your plastic bottle, or ask a local woman to teach you how to balance a terra cotta jar of it on your head. Driving through the towns, you'll see old men playing cards at tables in the main squares. Grandmothers sit on their doorsteps knitting, weaving or embroidering. You could spot a group of villagers waiting outside the house of a local santina , a psychic who "sees" the souls of the dead, sweats blood, blesses the farm animals or performs miracles. You may see small children, but you won't see as many of their parents, who periodically emigrate north or abroad to support their parents and offspring. Whenever they can, they return home to add that second storey to the house they're gradually financing. Come tour this strange, wonderful land, which has been conquered and forgotten by every major culture in the Western world. Should you decide to travel here, the residents will reward you with memories guaranteed to last a lifetime. _______Sights Edit This diamante diamante Calabria is the southern most region of Italy, the ankle and toe of the Italian "boot" – a rugged peninsula where grapevines, fig and olive trees cling to arid mountainsides, and where the immemorial sea crashes against the cliffs and beaches of its long, and intricate coastline, which faces east, south and west all at once. Of the 10 million or so English-speaking travellers who visit Italy every year, not many make it this far south. But, Calabria is in the process of being "discovered" by the "inglese", so this will change, as more and more people from the UK and North America learn about this astonishingly beautiful part of the world. Thousands of years ago, the local people, no fools, removed themselves from the vulnerable coastal areas to the mountain tops, where they built improbable towns and villages in mountain canyons and on mountain peaks, making conquest difficult, and sometimes impossible. There they scratched out a living on small farms, growing figs, olive and lemon trees, tending to small herds of goat and sheep. They mined the streams and rivers for gold. They carved roads and trails, which are in use even now. For millenia, the people here have made pottery, spun wool, knitted plain garments. They've milked their goats, made bread, rolled pasta, fermented wine and distilled limoncello , a sweet lemon aperitif. They have gone about their business, shop-keeping, worshipping in their numerous churches and duomos, and observing holy days and feast days around the year with pious gusto. And they do all of this today, a self-sufficient, self-reliant, practical, stubborn, no nonsense people whom other Italians say are "testa dura" - hard headed. When you come to the "new" Calabria, this place which has been inhabited for over 3,000 years, you will be dumbfounded by its scenery - whether you stay up in the mountains, or find your way along the winding coastal highways, to Calabria's seaside towns and beaches. You will find resorts, hotels, inns, hostels, bed and breakfasts, campgrounds, lidos and tourist parks, of every quality and degree, catering to people with small, medium or large budgets. _____History Edit This tropea tropea Calabria is one of the oldest regions of Italy. Millions of years ago it was part of the continent Tirrenide, which sank into the sea in the Tertiary Period. From the Archipelago it was made up of three islands and a larger peninsula which attached it to the massive Pollino. Calabria was invested with alluviums which covered its interior water bodies with a mantell of sediment, until eventually forming the current plains of: S. Eufemia, Corace, Sibari, Crati and Mesima. Later on, erosion and a slow process of a rising coastline resulted in the phenomenon of terracing, until reaching, in some points of the Aspromonte, the thousand meter mark. Today Calabria is a narrow penninsula approximately 250 km long, with no point in the territory more that 50 km from the coast. The mountain system stretches from its border with Basilicata to the strait of Messina, and land surface lying less than 200 meters above sea-level represents only 9% of the territory. The presence of humans in this region dates back to the first phases of antiquity, and around 700,000 years before Christ a type of Homo Erectus evolved leaving many traces of lithic industry spread along some coastal areas. The arrival of the Ice-Age and the Riss-Glacier swept every trace of human life from the isolette that constituted Calabria. Humans returned to Calabria in the Mid-Paleolithic Period, leaving traces throughout, and during the Stone-Age created, in the Cave of Romito, in the town of Papasidero, "the most majestic and joyous expression of Paleolithic Realism in the Mediterranean", the "Bos Primigenius", a figure of a bull on a cliff which dates back 12,000 years. When the Neolithic Revolution came, man changed from hunter to farmer (agriculture), and founded the first villages, around 3,500 B.C., becoming numerous in Calabria. During the Iron-Age new people came to Calabria, and around 1500 B.C. the prehistoric phase ended. Greeks arrived in large masses on the coasts and founded colonies that soon became rich and powerful, and truly merited the name "Magna Graecia." The region was called Saturnia, Ausonia, Enotria, Tirrenia, Esperia and finally Italia. In fact, before the Romans conquered and unified its [the peninsula's] many regions under one dominion the inhabitants of the southern part of Calabria were called Italians. The name, Italy extended from the south, northward, until identifying the entire peninsula by the time of Augustus, in 42 A.D. Numerous and infinite traces of Greek and Roman culture were left on the Calabrese territory, even if today's Calabresi are not fully aware of the history and cannot fully appreciate the value of this ancient heritage. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Calabria remained, for centuries, under the domination of the Byzantines, though Arabs and Lombards tried in vain to conquer the entire territory. The Normans arrived around 1000 A.D., and created the Kingdom of the South. After the Normans came the Swabians. In the regions of the south, Federico II created one of the most civilized nations in the world, the famous Kingdom of the Sun, a place to encounter a variety of cultures and civilizations: Western, Islamic and the Greek-Orthodox... In 1250 Federico died and the reign fell into the hands of the Angioini, who created an "iron-fisted" feudal system to control the subjects and the territory. The Angioini were followed by the Aragonese, Spanish, Austrians and Bourbons, and during these periods the population withdrew to the mountains and highlands, provoked by malaria, as well as numerous pirate raids along the coast, first by Saracens and then Turks. This phenomenon created an internal and external isolation, with population centers of the highlands and the valleys unable to communicate, and with impassable roads during the winter season. When Italy was unified in 1861, Calabria had only one road that crossed it from the north to Reggio in the south; the railroad was nonexistent and 90% of the towns had no internal or external roads. Only the effort of the national government and fascism contributed to breaking this isolation. And today, changes in social and economic conditions have resulted in a radical change of direction. Because of tourism, many population centers are situated along the marine coasts and are becoming more important than their highland counterparts. But this has also created problems: land and construction speculation have ruined the landscape in many places, and the dispersion of the population has caused a loss of heritage and cultural traditions that the Calabresi past has marked. _____Festivals Edit This photo Altomonte: Festival of Two Seas (July-August). Bagnara: Swordfish Festival (July). Caccuri: Easter Procession (Good Friday). Calanna: Festival of Madonna del Rosario (first Sunday in October). Camigliatello Silano: Wild Mushroom Festival (October). Castrovillari: International Festival of Folklore (August). Catanzaro: Easter Procession (Good Friday). Caulonia Marina: Caracolo Historical Procession (Good Friday). Celico: Living Nativity Scene (December). Corigliano Calabro: Orange Festival and Procession (January). St. Francis of Paola Day Festivities (April). Cosenza: Festival delle Invasioni (July). Cutro: Crucifixion Procession (May). Diamante: Saint's Day Festivities (December). Girifalco: St. Rocco Festivities (August). Joppolo: St. Sixtus Festivities (August). Laino Borgo: Ancient Easter Procession (Good Friday). Laureana di Borrello: Madonna del Carmine Festivities (third Sunday in July). Maida: St. Francis of Paola Day Festivities (first Sunday in July). Montalto Uffugo: Easter Procession (Good Friday). Lido di Palmi: Maritime Procession of the Madonna (August). Praia a Mare: Festival of Madonna della Grotta (August). San Basile: Albanian Folklore Festival (Tuesday after Pentecost). San Giovanni in Fiore: Easter Procession (Good Friday). Capo Vaticano (from Santa Maria to Santa Domenica): Procession of Boats and Swimmers (August). Seminara: Parade of the Faithful and the Tambourine Players (August). Soverato Superiore: Eggplant Festival (September). Spilinga: Sausage Festival (August). Torre di Ruggiero: Festival of Madonna delle Grazie (September). Vibo Valentia (church of the Modonella): Pasta Festival (July). Villaggio Mancuso: Calabrian Folklore Festival (September).