Soverato

April 16, 2016

We arrive in Soverato around 4:00 P.M. at the address which will be our home for the next month (see pictures on page 47) and ring the bell at the gate. Rosario Matrice comes to greet us. Rosario doesn't speak much English, so he begins talking to Gary in Italian, and Gary seems to be understanding most of what he says. He takes us to our apartment, which is a studio with a double bed, fully equipped (albeit small) kitchen, bathroom with washing machine, satellite TV (all the stations are in Italian, of course!) and a large terrace. Rosario and his wife, Maria Colasante (see picture at top of page 49), own and operate the "Villa Hermosa", a B & B which has three apartments in addition to the basement living quarters, where Rosario and Maria live during the summer. In the winter, they move to the upstairs apartment, which is warmer. Rosario tells us that Maria is at the hair salon at the moment, but that they want to invite us to dinner tonight at 8:00 (another thing about the Italian lifestyle that we have to get used to-much later dinners!). We unpack, then relax on the terrace a while, then Gary goes to get a bottle of wine to take to our hosts tonight. Eight o'clock comes and we go downstairs, to be greeted warmly by Rosario, who invites us in. Their apartment downstairs is definitely more spacious than our studio, but is a bit more cluttered and the decorating style is colorful, kitschy and somewhat hectic!

April 16, 2016 (Continued)

We meet Maria, along with a colleague of hers, Giuseppe Muccilli. Maria and Giuseppe are both high school English teachers in Soverato. Maria teaches at the "technical" school, while Giuseppe teaches at the traditional high school. Giuseppe lived in the U.S. for several years when he was young, in Buffalo, N.Y. His family is in the cheese business, and moved to Buffalo when his father began working for the "Sorrento Cheese Company". Rosario gives us some suggestions for places to visit on the weekend. This coming weekend, however, we will be going to Sicily (see Sicily chapter on pages 22 to 45).

April 29, 2016

Today we decide to take Rosario's suggestion and visit Serra San Bruno, whose main attraction is the Carthusian monastery, "Serra San Bruno Charterhouse (Certosa di Santo Stefano di Serra San Bruno)", around which the town grew up. The town is named after Saint Bruno of Cologne, who founded the Carthusian Order in 1053. Unfortunately, we didn't do our research, nor did we get directions and ended up at the "Museo e Biblioteca Della Certosa" (page 50), which didn't have any sort of signage, so we thought we were at the monastery. The "Museo" is a part of the monastery, so at least we were close! The Serra San Bruno area is known for its mushrooms, and we stopped at "Serfunghi Di Calabretta", which is a shop that specializes in mushrooms. However, for some inexplicable reason, we didn't buy any mushrooms, only some of what we

April 29, 2016 (Continued)

thought was dried tomato sauce which turned out to be red peppers, which we gave to Rosario and Maria. We end the evening in Soverato having dinner at "La Lanterna Rossa".

April 30, 2016

Today we are going on another outing to one of the sights recommended by Rosario, "Castello Aragonese" in Isola di Capo Rizzuto, about an hour's drive northeast of Soverato (see map on page 51). We have lunch at the "Ristorante Aragonese", from which you can see Castello Aragonese.

April 30, 2016 (Continued)

After lunch, we explore the castle, which was built in the fifteenth century and served as a shelter for soldiers engaged in battle against invaders attacking from the sea. Next we head back toward Soverato, stopping for a few photos in Catanzaro (top of page 54), which is the capital of Calabria. The picture in the middle of page 54 is the Catanzaro Bridge, a well-known, one-arch bridge which is one of the tallest in Europe. Back in Soverato, we have pizza at Klaxon (bottom of page 54) while watching Italian music videos. In the process, we become a fan of Cesare Cremonini, an Italian singer-songwriter.

May 6, 2016

Friday is market day in Soverato (page 55), so we decide to check it out. It covers quite a large area, and we buy some cheese for dinner on Sunday. Later that evening we go with Rosario and Maria to meet their friends Enzo and Paola and Rosario and Maria (yes, another couple with the same names!) for Napolitan pizza (bottom of page 55). First came traditional Italian appetizers such as arancino, prosciutto, etc., then the pizza arrived. We assumed that was the end of the meal, but after the pizza came a dish called panuozzo, which is basically pizza dough filled with cheese and prosciutto and heated in a wood-burning oven. It really was too much to eat, but we couldn't resist! Luckily, there was no dessert!

May 7, 2016

We had been told by Rosario in glowing terms of a place called "Musaba", about an hours' drive southwest of Soverato in the foothills of the Aspromonte Mountains near Mammola. MuSaBa (Museum Santa Barbara) is hard to describe, but is as unforgettable as Rosario promised. It is the brainchild of artists Nik Spatari and Hiske Maas, who decided in 1969 to convert a crumbling 11th-century monastery into an "art park"- a concept, a park, a museum and a laboratory all rolled into one. Nik (short for Nicodemus, as in Nicodemus of Mammola, the town’s patron saint) studied in Paris and had a gallery in Milan with Hiske, herself an artist as well as a manager-entrepreneur. We follow the brightly-colored, hand-painted signs along the side of the road to find Musaba.

May 7, 2016 (Continued)

There are no directions once we get there, so we start walking up the hill to a structure that looks somewhat like a church, albeit a weird one (bottom of page 57). We reach the building at the top of the hill and walk around a path to the back, when suddenly a woman appears, informing us that we have wandered onto the grounds of a personal residence. It turns out that she is Hiske Maas. Hiske is Danish but speaks excellent English and very graciously gives us a personal tour of the place. The structure and the works of art, which include mosiacs of all types, are astonishing in their scope, ingenuity, eroticism, beauty and humor. Nik, who we meet at the end of the tour and who draws a picture of Kerry (which looks nothing like me, by the way!) in the book that we bought (bottom of page 61), is a well-known and highly regarded artist and architect who with Hiske has spearheaded the ongoing construction of Musaba for nearly 50 years. Musaba is indeed a delight for the senses and is a tribute to the vision and persistence of Nik and Hiske.

May 7, 2016 (Continued)

We take our leave of this very impressive duo and drive into the town of Mammola, where we have lunch at Il Mulino (top of page 64). This restaurant features stocco, a specialty of the area, which is dried codfish that has been reconstituted. Yes, stocco is about as good as it sounds! Gary and I laugh about the name of the dish-we presume it is called that because it gets "stuck-o" in your teeth! Our next stop is Gerace, another hilltop town recommended by Rosario. We take a tour of the the Norman Cathedral , the largest religious building in Calabria (middle of page 64), with its display of gold-threaded

May 7, 2016 (Continued)

vestments (bottom of page 64). Our last stop for the day is in the town of Badolato (page 65), where we stop in at a restaurant (La Botte) for a glass of wine served in what looks like a coffee cup. Back home in Soverato, we search online for a place to have dinner and decide on Sale Pepe, which has very good reviews on Trip Advisor. It is located in a very nondescript and hard-to-find part of town, but the food is incredible! We had traditional Calabrian dishes explained in detail by Emanuele (on the right in the picture below), whose brother Andrea is the chef. The restaurant was empty when we arrived, which was around 7:30 (on the early side for dinner in Italy), so we assumed that it would fill up. As it turned out, we were the only diners that evening and were treated like royalty!

May 7, 2016 (Continued)

We were so impressed that we decided to return for our last night out in Soverato.

May 8, 2016

This is our last Sunday in Soverato, and we go for the last time to Soverato Dolci, our favorite "caffetteria/gelateria/
pasticceria". We have spent a few Sunday mornings here having coffee and pastries and prosecco in the afternoons.

May 12, 2016

We have been invited by Rosario and Maria to join them and their friends at the restaurant (Trattoria Della Scaletta) where their son Michael works as a chef. We meet up with the "other" Rosario and Maria, and Enzo and Paola and start walking to the restaurant, where we have been before. On our first Sunday in Soverato, Rosario and Maria took us to this restaurant to meet Michael. However, I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to how we got there, which is unfortunate

May 12, 2016 (Continued)

because on this night, while the others are making their way to the restaurant, I get distracted taking pictures of the cathedral, which was beautifully lit. Before I know it, the group is out of sight and I am on my own, having no idea of the name of the restaurant or where it is located! I wait a few minutes, thinking that for sure Gary will appear momentarily to rescue me. However, after about 10 minutes I begin to worry: "surely someone will notice that I'm not there! Am I really that transparent (or worse, boring!) that, after this amount of time, no one notices that I am not there?" I find a seat on a wall outside a restaurant where a group of Italian men have congregated. To me, I'm thinking that they could be Mafia. I try to call Gary, but the call doesn't go through, so after about 15 minutes I text him: "Where are you? I'm lost!" At that moment, Gary appears at the entrance of the restaurant where the Mafia men are gathered. Unbeknownst to me, I have been sitting right outside the restaurant where the others have been happily conversing for the past 15 minutes, assuming that I will arrive momentarily after finishing my picture-taking!

May 13, 2016

We return to Sale Pepe for our last dinner out in Soverato, and are not disappointed. It is as good as the last time, and once again, we are the only diners in the place!

Random Memories of Our Time in Soverato:

The photos on page 70 are of the beautiful Soverato Beach on the pristine Ionian Sea, and "Miramare", the place to see and be seen in Soverato, which became a favorite hangout of ours.

One sight which we saw all too often throughout southern Italy was the spectre of an abandoned building, either a residence, as seen in the pictures below from Rosario and Maria's neighborhood, or a commercial structure. Southern Italy has always been poorer than the northern part of the country, never more so than after the recent economic recession. It is a tale of two economies: of the 943,000 Italians who became unemployed between 2007 and 2014, 70% were southerners. Builders, who began a building project with optimism, found that midway through the construction, there weren't enough funds to complete it, so they simply walked away! The shells of partially-completed buildings litter the landscape between Naples and Soverato. We were taken aback at first, but unfortunately, we got used to seeing them.

Random Memories of Our Time in Soverato (Continued):

Finally, the picture below illustrates something that took us the whole month to master: the recycling schedule in Soverato. I don't know what we would have done if Gary weren't able to read Italian! Even then, he was never sure which category was being collected on which day. There were so many containers that I never figured out where to put a used tissue! Gary was constantly pulling them out of one container and putting them in the other. He finally gave up, confident that we would be leaving before the recycling police descended upon us! It is now time to take our leave of Soverato and move on to Tuscany, but first a night in Frascati, which is famous for the white wine with the same name.