Exactly a year ago, John and I were getting ready to leave Tropea, a small and almost impossibly picturesque coastal town in Calabria. In sight of the smoking island of Stromboli, Tropea sits atop a tall cliff of tuff—a kind of rock formed by volcanic ash that was once ejected from an eruption and then gradually compressed into rock.
During the summer season of June through August, Tropea is a big tourist destination. The main attraction is the beaches, which are white-sanded wonders, and the sea views. From the top of the cliff you can look down and see swimmers in the clear, sparkling water, and the Isola di Tropea with the Sanctuary of Santa Maria perched on top of her own tuff cliff surrounded by sea. The view was especially beautiful at sunset, when the great orange ball sinks right into Stromboli’s crater, as if God were doing a final trick-shot in a cosmic game of mini golf.
Apart from that, the town itself is charming (as most southern Italian towns are tbf), with a warren of medieval-era streets overlaid with pale cobblestones and lined by elegant Baroque buildings. Being a tourist town, it was crammed with shops selling beachwear, gelato and local specialties like apotropaic ceramic masks and knickknacks, hot peppers (‘Viagra Calabrese’) and intricate miniature models carved from wood.
Another star is the local variety of red onion, famous Italy-wide for its fresh sweetness. In markets throughout the peninsula, you will see bunches or braids of these pink, slim, elongated onions with the ‘Tropea DOP’ label. They can be eaten raw, put in a frittata, stuffed, added to salad or made into jam (or, as John suggests, thrown). According to a few signs about town, they can also be put into gelato.
Less specifically local but still important to Calabria is citrus. The province supplies about a quarter of Italy’s citrus fruit. One of the stars is the bergamot orange, which is used to add its distinctive smell and flavour to tea (Early Grey, for example), tobacco, cosmetics and lots of other things. Another is cedar (Citrus medica). Rabbis visit the province every year to find the perfect Jewish cedar, or Etrog, which is used in Sukkot, the Feast of Booths. Bergamot and cedar are specifically grown in Calabria but it’s also a great environment to grow mandarins, clementines, oranges and lemons.
We had not gone to Tropea for the souvenirs or the produce but for the evanescent prospect of linguistic competence. We were hoping to improve our Italian with intensive lessons at a school specializing in teaching Italian to foreigners on their summer vacation. We looked up a school, Piccola Università Italiana, which had good reviews (fully deserved—the teachers are all well qualified and hard working) and booked.
For three months, we had the same routine, which was tiring but had a lot of bright spots. First, we got up earlier than we otherwise would to get coffee at the corner place as municipal staff were still collecting all the tourist trash accumulated the day before, and as swallows were swooping and screaming over the mostly empty cobblestone streets. Then we went to class—four hours of grammar and conversation in small classes that all had a holiday feel. The Germans especially seemed practically giddy to be in this sunny beach paradise. On one occasion, our teacher Olga—a very sincere Neapolitan—explained that you should never pack coffee grounds tightly into a moka pot because “il caffe soffre.” This set Ursula off on a five-minute fit of the giggles “SOFFRE! It SUFFERS!” she gasped, holding onto her sides, delighted at the high seriousness afforded to espresso lore.
The school had helped us find accommodation a few blocks from the campus. It was a big old building, some kind of palazzo that was now converted into four or five apartments. The ceilings were very high and the rooms huge. We especially liked the bedroom, which could be converted into a dark, cool cave by closing the wooden shutters and turning on the air conditioning.
Very close to our apartment was the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Romania, a Norman Church named for a holy painting done by a pupil of Giotto around 1230. The legend goes that a boat carrying the painting was travelling from the Eastern Roman Empire (Constantinople) but was blown off course in a storm and put in at Tropea for repairs. When it was fixed, the ship mysteriously wouldn’t budge. Not only that, but the local bishop had a recurring dream that the Virgin Mary was asking that the painting stay in the city. The Bishop took the painting off the ship, the ship was able to leave and the Madonna of Romania became the city’s protector.
Embarrassingly, we only made it to the beach three or four times in our whole stay. It was an extremely steep cliff and the prospect of climbing up 300 steps after swimming was generally a bit much. There were tuk-tuks, but they cost a whopping 20 euros per five-minute ride. Also, we didn’t quite know how the lidos worked. We initially thought we’d be able to swim for free as long as we didn’t use a beach chair or umbrella but the proprietor quickly disabused us of that notion, cursing at us furiously and telling us to get off his beach, which acted as a deterrent for at least a month.
When I mentioned our trauma to Elise, a sympathetic classmate from South Carolina, she recommended Lido Tropical, where people were super friendly and we ended up going there three times despite the cliff walk. The water was so warm and still it felt like a bath, which is weird if you ask me.
One thing I’m glad I did while I was there was take a train down to Reggio Calabria to see the Riace Warriors. These are two ancient bronze statues cast about 450 BCE and were aboard a ship that wrecked somewhere near Riace. They were found in 1972 and now live in the Museo Nazionale della Magna Grecia, in a climate-controlled room where only a small number of people can enter at any given time. Apart from the statues, there were plenty of other amazing pieces.
There were several little glitches that prevented us from idealizing Tropea. Except for the early mornings, the streets were full of dawdling tourists and harassed locals. The internet never worked in our apartment and the water sometimes stopped completely for hours on end. The air conditioner dripped constantly. There was a restaurant under our bedroom and the noise went on until one o’clock in the morning (plus the restaurant owner yelled at me once for putting our garbage on the street at 10.30pm, as I’d been told to. How was I to know it would obscure his stupid menu sign?). John was particularly psychologically affected by the fact that a 60-year-old singer who had some kind of deal with the restaurant appeared punctually under our window every night to sing Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” (“Soooo, sooo you think you can telll…“). We also got completely sick of pizza and bread.
At a year’s distance, the memory of those inconveniences fades and I am mainly left with a sense of intense color and sensory overload: the smell of jasmine in a warm evening, a puppet show in the piazza, the feeling of fellowship among students from different countries, the sight of an red onion skin being blown along the cobblestones by a warm breeze.
