Cosenza

September 17th to 18th

We trooped down the rail line towards Calabria, the most unanticipated location of the trip, mainly because the LP guide writer hates the place. We are sure of it. She's had nothing good to say about the south really. It isn't Tuscany, but it's not that bad. Getting to our first stop, Cosenza, involved a change of train and heading inland. Most people go there to go to the local National Park. We went to look at the town, because we really aren't kitted out for walking and neither of us would really trust an Italian with our luggage, especially after my parent's luggage was stolen off a train.

So we got to the new train station, which is uninspiring, and caught a local train to the old station. Getting off we could see our targetted hotel and got a room with large bathroom and queen-sized bed for the first time on the trip. Cable news, air-conditioning, internet down stairs, we nearly didn't leave the room. One must venture forth, though, to find new snippets to amuse our adoring fan. And the rest of you.

The Old Town is built along the side of a virtual cliff. The usual series of earthquakes has destroyed much of the keep and whatever other old buildings they had. (So far only the Perugians have managed to lose a major historic building by injudicious use of dynamite.) Cosenza Old Town however is mostly intact. A walk up towards the Duomo -- a Norman effort destroyed and rebuilt of course -- took a slightly windy, quite narrow paved road with traffic roaring up it, past the facades of shops that look as though they have been there for a century. The road continues up to the theatre and a relatively flat part of town. We walked further up hill for dinner. Calabrian food presented by a host who expounded the virtues of Calabrian cuisine and dug out an exellent bottle of decanted wine, not that we saw the bottle. Our dinner was hijacked, but worth it.

Not really much else to see or say about Cosenza. We left, on a slow bus that got us to the New Station too late for our train. The driver was busy talking...

Tropea

September 18th to 20th

From Cosenza we moved on to Tropea. This was a slow move. Walk to the Old Station, find out train leaves at same time as the New Station train does, catch bus to New Station, get there late. Get on train that takes ages to... what's this?!!? Bloody hell! The train we get on not only has toilets but has power from which I can operate my ever finnicky laptop! Two hours and several Daily Shows later and we were somewhere else being shoe-horned off said train after being talked at by some small Italian gentleman who cared not a jot that we had no idea what he was saying and was quite happy giving us the full family rundown including pictures of his grandson. We then caught a little diesel train around the north coast of some little bump on the west side of Calabria to Tropea. Getting off the train we yet again had no idea where to go, mainly because the guidebook had no map at all. After getting the offer of a ten Euro taxi fare, we phoned the tourist office and found that the main part of town was a five minute roll down the hill. On the way we spotted a four star hotel and actually found it was within our budget, included breakfast and had a kitchen. Magic!

We decided to head for the beach given that this was one of the reasons for coming to Tropea. We walked through the Old Town towards the beach, and discovered the town is actually built on a cliff. Not a small cliff either: something like a 40 metre sheer drop. This was not indicated on the map, which is probably a failing of the map, but not a serious one, the roads were in exactly the right places and even topological gradients wouldn't have helped. We had to backtrack to get to the beach via a switch-back road. Another swim in the Mediterranean, and we wandered slowly back uphill, watching the sun setting through the haze over what we figured might be Stromboli. Yet another tough gig.

Breakfast the next day was the best we'd had so far. Cheeses, cold meats, fresh fruit, eggs, freshly sqeezed juices. I figure this will make an entry on Hal's food or hotel pages. Can't really remember doing much else other than wandering the town, having dinner, and swimming. A fabulous way to spend our last evening on mainland Italy. I would recommend this spot for a holiday, as long as you like poms and germans. The next day we caught another dodgey diesel train heading down the coast, then a larger train to a port to catch a ferry to Sicilia...

Summary

Rating time! So again here are my purely scientifically thingy and mathematically thingy ratings of each town: