Lifestyle and people
Plenty of leisure activities
Calabria is blessed with an extensive and spectacular coastline. Here you can laze on a sun-drenched beach or take advantage of the many water sports facilities including deep sea fi shing, snorkelling, scuba diving and windsurfing.
If you are a diving novice, there are several specialist teaching centres. If you are an experienced diver, you can explore one of the 150 sunken ships, which have become a natural oasis for the marine fl ora and fauna.
You might instead prefer to paraglide from high cliffs down to crystal blue waters or maybe to paddle down the rivers in a canoe or a kayak with qualifi ed staff of A.I.RAF. (Associazione Italiana Rafting).
If you are a golf lover, you’ll be happy to know that there are two nine-hole golf courses, with more planned in the future.
But Calabria is not only a wonderful place to enjoy the summer months, winter time sees skiers taking to the high slopes in the central region’s Sila National Park.
Calabrian festivals
Calabria celebrates many feast days and festivals such as the Calabrian Renaissance Festival renowned for its spectacular entertainment including a ‘living’ chess game!
Calabria has two principal types of festival: religious and gastronomic. Calabria’s traditional festivals have religious origins based on art, spirituality and plain entertainment. Given its origins of Ancient Greek and Roman, Norman and Byzantine, French and Spanish, the events combine the orthodox with ethnic rituals creating a colourful, festive and dramatic atmosphere.
Gastronomic festivals, or ‘sagre’ in Italian, are based on a certain crop or farming at a given time of year. In January, entire towns have ‘La Sagre di Maiale’, Pork Feast, where every imaginable type of pork based dish is prepared in town squares by numerous families and the entire population spends three days feasting together. There are many others as well for those who don’t eat pork!
Shopping the Italian way
You only have to look at how well dressed the locals are in the major cities to know that shopping for quality clothes is almost a religion in Italy. With home grown fashion gurus like Versace and Gucci, it’s not surprising.
Whatever your retail fancy, Italy is bound to provide lots of opportunities to splash out. And whether you feel like a day of indulgent retail therapy in the cool boutiques of a major cosmopolitan city, or wandering down a traditional cobbled street with shops and stalls selling trinkets and unique pieces, shopping is always a pleasure. But before you reach for your plastic, there are a few practical pointers to bear in mind.
- You’ll find that many of the larger city stores will open on Sunday, but smaller local stores will vary according to region.
- High street stores in cities and large malls will normally be open at around 9.30am and stay open until around 9.00pm - and as late as midnight in tourist areas throughout the summer.
- Smaller, local shops will usually open around 10.00am and close for lunch between 1.30 and 4.00pm and then open again until 8.00pm.
