Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Reggio Calabria”
“Non mollare.” — Don’t give up. As we ring in the New Year with resolutions full of challenge and optimism, the advice of an octogenarian who has swum the Strait of Messina 23 times is as good as it gets. Add to that, he was 49 years old when he attempted it for the first time. Reggio Calabria native Elio …
“In Diretta” – LIVE! This past week I had my first occasion to speak on Italian radio. I converse in Italian all the time, but simultaneously staring down a microphone was a new experience for me. I was the invited guest of Tonino Massara, enthusiastic host of the program “Terzo Millennio” (Third Millennium) on Radio Antenna Febea in Reggio Calabria.
I recently came across a handful of photos I had snapped a couple of years earlier in a bar in Bova Marina. At what I had anticipated to be a routine roadside coffee stop in a locale at the very tip of the Italian boot, I stumbled upon entertaining sugar packets stamped with traditional Calabrian proverbs. There’s nothing like a …
In Italy, you can’t put a shovel to the ground or duck underwater off the coast without running into something old. And I’m not talking about the age of the objects paraded in front of the Antiques Roadshow camera. I mean ancient. Some discoveries, like the Riace Bronzes, are world-shaking. Others would be front-page news most anywhere but Italy. The …
“Kalimera.” A spry, older woman dressed in black warmly greeted us as we stepped out of the car and began to walk up the street to the main square of Gallicianò. She was like the town sentinel and greeter all in one, speaking perfect Italian to us, then lithely pulling a cell phone out of her pocket to call our …
When I begin to talk enthusiastically about the archeological museum in Reggio Calabria, I usually just get blank stares. If I show a photo or two of the famous Bronzes of Riace, interest piques. Once I have my listener’s attention, I introduce the rest of the museum’s collection.
Otherworldly screams? Laments from the afterlife? The bloody hand of the devil? The poor town of Pentedattilo on the edge of the Aspromonte Mountains in the southern tip of Calabria has seen it all. Earthquakes and precarious shifting of soil lent the final blow. But this cluster of edifices clinging to a strange rock formation, finally abandoned completely in the …
“We were told in no uncertain terms that we were the type of people who wore shoes…” Grazia Ietto Gillies reminisces of her early life in By the Olive Groves, A Calabrian Childhood, a memoir that focuses on her time growing up in Delianuova, a hill town of southern Calabria.
Before visiting the Museo San Paolo housed in Reggio Calabria’s Palazzo della Cultura, I was under the impression that it was just the usual collection of a couple pieces of silver, a few religious paintings and an old frock. How many times have I paid the Euro and gone through a side door past a heavy velour curtain to view …
Intriguing, eclectic, thought provoking – a few words I would use to describe the Palazzo della Cultura, a new museum in Reggio Calabria that is definitely worth the visit.