Into the Heart of Darkness Part 2 - Reggio di Calabria: "What the fuck are you doing here?"
Adventures in Napoli, Reggio di Calabria, and Palermo on the Island of Sicily
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“Why the fuck did you come here?”, asked the hotel manager. “What are you doing here?”, he continued to inquire, perplexed.
When I told people in person or online that I was going to Calabria, I would get this line of inquiry every single time, except for those who know me and my interests rather well. “No one goes to Calabria unless they’re visiting family”, one friend on Twitter said to me.
But visit I must!
Unlike Napoli or Palermo, Calabria has no significantly-as-important urban centre. Reggio di Calabria is much smaller than either of those two internationally-known cities. Calabria really doesn’t resonate on the global stage, either. Very little news comes from it, it has no great soccer team legacies, and no real branding outside of the ‘Ndrangheta, the name applied to the various organized crime clans throughout the peninsula. To many people, including Italians, it is an afterthought.
A terra incognita? At least in my mind it was.
The unfortunate thing about travelling by train from Napoli to Reggio di Calabria is the sheer number of tunnels along the way. As you pass Mount Vesuvius to the south, the tease of the interior and its mountains gets constantly interrupted by these tunnels. As you move further south towards the borders between Campania, Basilicata, and Calabria, the train will pass through dozens of trenches when not going through tunnels. These will obstruct your view of the coastline, one which is dotted with seaside resorts.
As you approach the final bend towards Reggio, the island of Stromboli comes into clear view. This is reportedly the volcanic island the inspired Mt. Doom in Mordor in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It is seen from a great distance as the train seems to be headed directly for it, until that final turn south.
“Why Calabria?”, you should by now be asking.
The largest share of the Italian diaspora that I grew up around in Southern Ontario came from Calabria. I wanted to see where they came from, how the surroundings made them into what they are, and what life there is actually like. I had no mental image of Calabria, unlike Napoli or Sicily. All I knew was that the Aspromonte Mountains dominated the peninsula, acting like its spine. I also wanted to see how they differed in looks and temperament to their better known neighbours to the north and southwest.
Calabria’s largest city, Reggio, is at the very tip of Italy’s toe, lying just across the Messina Strait. The distance between the two landmasses is only 3km and its most narrow point. This short distance serves as enough of a break to have greatly impacted and heightened the cultural and historical differences between Calabria and Sicily. The very unpredictable seismic activity under the sea means that a bridge connecting the two has been thus far impossible to build. Instead, ferries are how one moves from the mainland to Sicily, and vice versa.
Reggio is not a beautiful city in relative Italian terms. It had to be rebuilt after the 1908 Earthquake that saw the city completely destroyed, costing it and neighbouring Messina on Sicily up to 82,000 lives. Desperate Calabrians scaled down the slopes of the city to the waterfront at the Strait of Messina to get to safety from the earthquake, only to see them swallowed up and swept away by the tsunami that followed.