Locride (Calabria, Italy)

An ill-famed region - Tell your neighbour or caretaker or doctor that you spend your holiday there and they will start commenting on the mafia, the poverty of villages, the ignorance of its inhabitants, the dirtiness of its streets. Reality, is, as often, different and more complex. Indeed, few people know it used to be an important Greek colony, few people will tell you about the splendor of its landscapes and the fantastic welcome they give you. Not to mention its food, its hundred year old olive-trees so huge and twisted. The soil is arid, as hard as the life of its inhabitants. Proud though they are, they are realistic about the difficulties the region has to cope with. Those who had to leave have enriched the north or other countries, but lots of young people today would not leave their authentic land and their well-being for anything on earth.

Locride is bathed by Ionian sea whose crystal like waters are bordered by long sand beaches or shingles. Nature is almost untouched, the atmosphere is magic so unlike television "clichés". The villages, on the top of the surrouding hills or nestled at the foot of the mountains can only be reached through small winding roads and open themselves to visitors like small caskets. Caulonia, Riace, Pazzano, Roccella, Stignano, Stilo, Gerace, Placanica; quiet during the long winter months, are populated in summer when the people who moved by poverty and had been forced to leave their own land, return. The small squares and the streets are alive again. Children invade the streets on which they play while adults talk sipping their coffee. And when the Saint Patron's day approaches, everybody is busy with their preparations in order to have the most beautiful decorations and the best brass-band. The procession unwinds its way along the streets punctuated by the brass, the cymbals and the bass-drum, while people are walking behind them letting themselves be slowly wrapped in the last rays of the sun. (Text: Stefania Graziano & S. Glockner)

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