bergamot in the groves, chestnut smoke above, the sea still warm
Reserve a nine night Calabria vacation package in October
Nine nights are held on one reservation, five in a four room house at Bova, a village at just under 2,700 feet on the Aspromonte massif, and four in a sixteen room family hotel on the shingle at Bianco, with a hire car for the whole run and two guided days on foot, from $2,892 per person on two sharing. October is the month the water off this shore still reads about 76 degrees in the first week while the chestnut ovens are lit in the mountain villages and the bergamot cut begins in the groves below them.
Nine nights, from $2,892 per person. Two sharing.
Nine nights are held on one reservation: five in a four room stone house in Bova, a village at just under 2,700 feet on a spur of the Aspromonte massif, and four in a sixteen room family hotel on the shingle at Bianco, twenty five minutes down the Ionian shore from Locri. A hire car covers the whole run. You collect it at Lamezia Terme, on the Tyrrhenian side, and the drive across to Bova on your arrival afternoon is a hundred miles and takes two and a half hours without stopping.
Getting to Italy is your own arrangement and this office arranges no flight of any kind. What it reserves is the two beds, the car and the two guided days on foot, and it places that request with the company in Reggio Calabria that runs the ground, holds the rooms and drives the transfers. That company invoices you itself, on its own paperwork, in euro. Nothing is paid at this office, at any point.
October is the only month this itinerary works, and the reason is stacked. Through August the road into Bova carries family traffic all day and the four rooms are taken by people who were born in the village. From the first week of November the shore hotel closes, the village house keeps one dining room going for whoever happens to be there, and the higher roads shut after the first weather. October gives you water at about 76 degrees in the first week, the chestnut harvest on the massif from around the 8th, and the start of the bergamot cut in the coastal groves in the last ten days of the month. Starts run weekly.
When it goes
Weekly starts through October, and no other month
any week in one month: weekly starts through the month, and no other month works
What is reserved
A nine night Calabria vacation package in October
Nine nights, from $2,892 per person. Two sharing. Send a booking request
Two beds are held on one reservation, five nights at the village house and four at the shore hotel, with a compact hire car collected at Lamezia Terme on the arrival afternoon and returned there on the tenth morning, and the two guide days blocked in the middle of the run.
Bergamot grows commercially in a strip about sixty miles long and four miles deep along this shore and effectively nowhere else, and the cut starts in the last ten days of October, so the coastal groves smell of it while the massif behind them smells of chestnut smoke. The mountain climbs from the water to 6,414 feet at Montalto in about twelve miles of horizontal distance, which is why forty miles takes two hours and why the villages at 2,700 feet had no road at all until the 1950s. Between Bova and Gallicianò a Greek dialect was the language of the kitchen into the 1960s and the street signs still carry it alongside the Italian. The fiumare, the quarter mile wide stone riverbeds, are dry enough to walk in for most of October and then take one day of rain and move the whole mountain's water in a few hours. Daylight falls from eleven hours and fifty minutes on the 1st to ten hours and twenty five on the 31st, and the clocks go back on the 25th, so the final week is dark by a quarter past five. The sea off Bianco reads about 76 degrees in the first week of the month and about 71 in the last.
Nine nights in two beds, five in a four room village house at Bova and four in a sixteen room family hotel at Bianco; breakfast every morning at both, bread, sheep ricotta, chestnut honey and coffee at the village house; five dinners at Bova, one menu a night, settled that afternoon; a compact hire car for nine days with unlimited mileage, collected and returned at Lamezia Terme; one guided walking day down the terraces into the Amendolea bed, with the car meeting you at the bottom; one guided day in Gallicianò with a Greko speaker, the two hour midday meal in the village included; a two hour passage along the shore in an open boat taking eight from Bova Marina, held and run by the operating company under its own passenger licence; admission to the archaeological park at Locri Epizefiri and to the mosaic floors at Casignana; a printed route sheet with the mountain runs timed rather than measured, and the two fuel stations that open on Sunday marked on it; one telephone number in Reggio Calabria that answers in English for the nine days.
The flight to Italy, which is your own arrangement and which this office does not arrange in any form, $820 to $1,450 round trip out of the middle of the United States in October; fuel for the nine days, $95 to $140, and hairpins burn more of it than the distance suggests; motorway tolls crossing between Lamezia Terme and the Ionian side, $18 to $26; the collision excess reduction on the car if you want it, $12 to $19 a day, taken by the car company at its own counter; four dinners on the shore, $22 to $45 a head at the two kitchens open in October; lunches on the seven unguided days, $9 to $20; parking under the walls at Gerace and at the Locri site, $2 to $4 a day; a third day with a guide on foot if the two are not enough, $170 to $230 for two people; anything you carry home out of the bergamot groves, which sell by the crate and not by the fruit.
The guided descent below Bova loses 1,400 feet in four and a half miles on loose terrace stone with no shade on it after ten in the morning, and if you cannot walk that, half of what you reserved is gone. The village house has nineteen stone steps to the two upper rooms and no lift, and the hospital is at Locri, fifty minutes down the mountain. Bova after ten at night makes no noise at all, there is nothing open, and some people are finished with that by the third evening. If you will not drive sixty hairpins in the dark, or you need to step out of your room onto sand, these are the wrong nine nights.
Twelve miles across, 6,414 feet up
Aspromonte rises from the water to Montalto, 6,414 feet, in about twelve miles measured flat, and that ratio governs every plan you will make here. Bova down to the sea at Bova Marina is nine miles and takes thirty five minutes, on a road with roughly sixty hairpins and long sections where two cars have to negotiate. Bova across to Gallicianò, the hamlet in the Amendolea valley, is fourteen miles and takes an hour and a quarter, and there is no fuel between the two. Assume forty miles in two hours anywhere off the shore road. Two mountain villages and an afternoon in the water will not fit into one day; people try it on day three and stop trying by day five.
The fiumare account for the rest of the arithmetic. They are riverbeds, some of them a quarter of a mile across, floored in white rounded stone, and for eleven months of the year they carry nothing whatsoever. Then one day of rain lands on the massif and they move all of it at once, in a few hours, which is why the shore road bends inland where it does and why the bridges are as long as they are. The Amendolea is the wide one you will cross. For most of October it is dry enough to walk in and the first guided day uses it, but after the middle of the month the guide makes that call on the morning rather than the evening before, and there is a second route along the upper terraces for when the call goes the other way.
Five nights at Bova, where dinner is at half past seven
Bova holds about four hundred people through the winter and stands on a rock above the Amendolea with a ruined Norman keep on top of it and one road in. The house has four rooms and no lift; the two upstairs are nineteen stone steps up from the street door, and the walls are thick enough that those rooms sit near 64 degrees on an afternoon when the square outside is at 72. Dinner is at half past seven or it is not at all. It is one menu, settled that afternoon, and in October it runs to pasta with goat or with wild fennel, then whatever came out of the oven, then a glass of the dried grape wine they press down at Bianco. Breakfast starts at half past seven. One bar on the square opens at seven in the morning and shuts at ten at night, and after ten the village makes no sound.
The Greko is why the second guided day exists. Bova and Gallicianò sit inside a small pocket where a Greek dialect, older in this ground than Italian is, was still the language people used at home into the 1960s. The street signs in Bova carry both. Your guide that day is one of a few dozen people who learned it from a grandmother rather than from a course, and the day is spent in Gallicianò, which has a dozen permanent residents, a spring house, a working loom and a small Orthodox chapel put up in 1999 by people who wanted the liturgy back in the village. Lunch is at a table there and it takes two hours, because it takes two hours.
The other guided day goes downhill on foot, through the abandoned terraces below Bova into the Amendolea bed. Four and a half miles, 1,400 feet of descent, loose stone underfoot the whole way, and no shade on any of it after ten in the morning. The car meets you at the bottom and takes you back up.
Sea 76 degrees, coast highs near 78, mountain highs 66, the fiumara beds dry and white
First rain usually reaches the massif, one or two days of it, and the chestnuts begin coming down
Chestnut weeks: the ovens in Bova are lit from four in the afternoon and the whole square smells of it
Shore highs 73 and sea 73, and the last of the dried grape harvest goes to press at Bianco
Clocks go back on the 25th and it is dark by a quarter past five, mountain lows near 43, sea holding at 71
Cutting starts in the groves between Bova Marina and Locri in the final ten days and runs on into February
The mountain road is busiest from noon to three, when families drive up to eat, so put the long runs on a weekday
Four nights on the Ionian shore, and the hour around it
The beach at Bianco is coarse grey and white shingle, it shelves hard, and you are in deep water fifteen feet from where you left your shoes. It is not sand and nobody there has ever pretended it is. Two kitchens stay open through October and both stop serving at half past nine. The dried grape wine comes off the slopes directly behind the town, from fruit laid out on mats in the sun through late September, and the growers' co operative will pour it for you in the morning if you telephone the day before.
Within an hour of that room there is more standing Greek and Roman material than you will get through in four days. Locri Epizefiri, five miles north, is a Greek colony founded around 680 BC with a city wall you can follow for a mile and a half and a museum that opens at nine and closes at seven. The mosaic floors at Casignana, four miles the other way, run to about a thousand square metres of Roman flooring, and the room with the four seasons in it is the one to give twenty minutes to. Gerace, twenty minutes inland and 1,640 feet up, has a cathedral consecrated in 1045 whose crypt stands on columns lifted out of Greek temples on the shore below. Stilo, an hour and a quarter north, holds a Byzantine brick church about twenty five feet square with five small domes on it, put up in the tenth century and standing since without a bolt in it.
How the reservation is held, and who sends the bill
A written figure against your own dates takes two to four working days to come back, and the wait is not paperwork. The village house has four rooms, so the answer depends on which of the four is free in your week, whether the Greko guide is already committed to somebody else, and what the car company is holding in the compact class at Lamezia Terme that week. The ground company checks all three by telephone and then writes back with one figure.
Third Coast Dispatch owns no aircraft, no rooms, no vessel and no vehicle, and it operates nothing described on this page. It is the name used by Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC, and this office sits at 600 SW Jefferson St, Suite 302 in Lee's Summit, MO 64063, working the Kansas City metro and the rest of Missouri. The two hour passage along the shore from Bova Marina is held and run by the operating company under its own passenger licence, and that company bills the seat itself along with the beds and the car. No flight is arranged from here.
Send your dates, the number of people and the week of October you want to bookings@thirdcoastdispatch.com, or telephone +1 (816) 525-2846 if you would rather say it out loud. If something above has gone out of date, and opening hours and figures in Calabria do move, write to corrections@thirdcoastdispatch.com and the page will be corrected.
Send this office a booking request
Open 24/7, this form will take a booking request whenever you write it. Nowhere on it is a card number requested and nothing is charged, because no money is ever owed to this office. Whatever reaches the form is opened in the order it landed, and an answer goes back inside one working day.
Nowhere on this page is a card number requested, and none is kept by this office anywhere. Writing costs you nothing and ties you to nothing. Asking is not the same as holding: your date belongs to whoever asks next until the operating company has confirmed it on paper and you have read what it requires of you.