Tropea
This is Calabria, the instep of Italy’s boot and one of its most beautiful and unknown region.
Sadly the ‘ndrangheta (local powerful mafia) is keeping away most of the tourists.
It’s not that it is really dangerous to walk through it for the common tourist (even if in that same beach a week after this photo was taken a man was shot dead by a mafia professional killer), it’s more that, due to the ‘ndrangheta’s reign of terror, the land is missing every kind of facilities and promotion and it is mentioned in the news just when some local politician or judge is murdered by the mafia, creating around it a very bad reputation.
Tropea is one of few places in this land to be quite touristic. The beach seems to be quite crowded but it’s nothing compared to the near beaches of Puglia. (Plus this picture was taken in mid-August that is supposed to be the most crowded period for Italy’s tourism).
Most of the people you see are locals or Calabrian emigrants back to their land to visit for the summertime. (Calabrians during the last century have emigrated away to northern Italy and to the rest of the world, so when you walk through a crowd you can even hear many accents and many languages, but very few of them are real tourists).
(If you’re asking, I don’t have any Calabrian origin, but I was there with and thanks to a friend whose parents were born and raised there before emigrating to northern Italy - and that’s another common way to visit the region.)
