On the day of Calabria’s creation, God found fifteen thousand square kilometers of green clay – with slight purple reflections – and Calabria flowed from His hands to become more beautiful than California or Hawaii, the French coast or even the islands of Japan.
-Leonida Repaci, the Calabrian intellectual, declared in his poem The Land of the Bruzi, transforming a physical place into a literary landscape of a thousand shades.
Calabria is a territory of rich and varied contrasts. Over its storied history it has been known by many names: Ausonia for its fertility; Esperia for its Western ways; Enotria as a land of flourishing vines and wine; Italy as home of Italo, the king who conquered it and inhabited it with his people from the late Iron Age; then Magna Grecia, although from the eighth century BC onwards, simply as Magna because it is more sumptuous than the mother country; Bruzia of the Bruzi, people who conquered and inhabited its cities for four centuries; and finally, for the last thousand years, Calabria, from the Greek Calon-brio, which means rich in every good way,
Its position is as enviable as it is strategic: stretched-out at the toe of the boot, between the Tyrrhenian and Ionian seas, and only a little more than three kilometers from Sicily across the Strait of Messina. Mostly hilly and mountainous, it is flat along its eight hundred kilometers of enchanting coast, yet boasts the highest and most rugged peaks on its border with the region of Basilicata and, at the end of the peninsula, where the Aspromonte Mountain peaks exceed two thousand meters. Famous above all for its long, white-sand beaches, that alternate from small inlets to rocks and high cliffs overlooking the sea, with many places, both on the Ionian and Tyrrhenian coast, still intact and wild, not yet exploited by tourism.
