As I write this short post I am sitting on my hotel room balcony listening to the sea, the beach is only some 40 metres in front of where I am sitting. This amazing town is Capo Rizzuto and the B and B is called BandB Capo Rizzuto front Mare, which just about tells its own story.
I am deep down in the far south of Italy in the toe, here we are close to lovely Sicily and quite close by sea to Greece to the east and then to the south we have north Africa. Well I guess that this also explains the mentality of some of the people down here. Whereas Sicily is amazingly well developed for tourists, Calabria seems to me about 50 years behind and here they do not seem to really want visitors!
That is totally not true of our lovely hosts at our stunning little hotel on the beach. These guys are super welcoming, the beach is about 50m in front of our room and breakfast is served upstairs with an amazing sea view. This area offers so much, I have covered many kilometres on my little bike each day just exploring and getting lost cos there are sooooo many lovely places to visit.
And the wonderful local restaurant L’Ancora (the Anchor) serves up wonderful food at amazingly good prices so we visited twice. But the service is dreadful!!! It almost seems like they want to serve the local guests and they are not interested in greeting new guests. Indeed when we visited for lunch we were seated and then ignored, a local family who were seated after us were able to order BEFORE us. Amazing.
Luckily we found another restaurant also named L’Ancora (not very original) about 20 kilometres away from us in a stunning area called Capo Colonna and here the service was 100 times better. We walked around the area and decided to ask if we could sit down for an aperitif. The owner manager fellow agreed and brought us firstly two glasses of a lovely Rose wine, and then he returned with a plate of fantastic cooked and raw nibbles. The view was amazing! So of course we stayed for dinner and the pasta with clams was FANTASTIC! Amazing experience.
BUT this is simply one example of the beauty and the beast that is Calabria. PLEASE look at some of my snaps below.
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