On balmy summer evenings in the southern Italian town of Tropea – the “Pearl of Calabria” – a crowd gathers beside the 17th-century cannon in the eponymous Piazza del Cannone, overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea.
As the sun dips, the sky turns the shade of a Calabrian clementine, and all gazes are drawn to the glowing sandstone walls of Santa Maria dell’Isola, a sixth-century Benedictine monastery that’s had several makeovers thanks to earthquakes.
It sits atop a rocky outlet as the pin-up for Tropea tourism, but on clear days, it’s the ever-smoking volcanic Aeolian Island of Stromboli that steals the show, 35 miles across the water.
Tropea is probably the most beautiful Italian town you’ve never heard of, even taking Italy’s much-coveted Borgo dei Borghi (“Village of Villages”) crown in 2021. And yet, its relative remoteness – perched almost at the toe of Italy’s boot – has kept it off the well-beaten tourist trail.
Visit in summer, and you’ll be mostly in the company of northern Italian holidaymakers (who help to keep standards high – no overcooked pasta or soggy-bottomed pizza here), though it is in spring, when local businesses raise their shutters after the long winter, and autumn that the town is at its loveliest (and still a pleasant 22C, on average).
It is a place defined in every sense by the sea which surrounds it. Viewed from a distance (best done by boat), imposing pink and apricot-hued stone residences rise from 70m-high granite cliffs, throwing shadows on to spearmint blue water.
This rugged coastline is known as the Costa degli Dei (Coast of the Gods), and Tropea is thought to take its name from the Greek word tropaia, meaning trophies, or from tropis, meaning ship’s hull (sailors say that, glimpsed through swirling sea mists, it is this that the town resembles).
Villa Paola is a dreamy blackcurrant-hued 16th-century convent, now a boutique hotel where toiletries smell of incense and nights are lit by candlelight.