As we awoke in our wild camping spot on the seafront in some seaside town too small to have a name on Google maps, the morning light illuminated Mount Etna across the Straights of Messina.
Etna in the morning light
Our first objective today was to visit the ghost town of Pentedattilo. We drove inland a few miles into the Calabrian mountains and eventually the road petered out and there, across a small valley were the abandoned remains. Legend has it that it is literally a ghost town, in that it was scene of a bloody ambush in the 17th Century and the handprints of the slaughtered Alberti family are said to be still visible.
Pentedatillo
I had hoped we would be able to wander around the empty streets, but although picturesque, clinging the hillside, the only part of the town which is accessible is a street or two which have been renovated by a small colony of artists. They were happy enough to try to sell us their wares, which from what I saw mostly consisted of not particularly artistic trinkets.
Pentedatillo
The renovated streets were not overly interesting and lovely puppy made Mabel’s life miserable by repeatedly trying to play with her. Mabel does not like other dogs and Sarah spent our entire stay trying to keep Mabel from nipping the puppy. She succeeded, but it did not improve our visit.
I then had the bright idea of cutting across the “toe” of Italy through the Aspromonte mountains. They are a national park and the route is marked as particularly scenic on our map. So, I turned Basils’s nose uphill and we started our ascent.
Basil doesn’t like the look of this
The Aspromonte Massif is the heartland of the feared Ndrangheta and we had fun pretending the man unloading his van had an consignment of drugs and another with a vehicle full of wood, was in fact hiding a dead body etc. What was not so funny was the slowly deteriorating state of the road. This was not a Swiss built mountain pass, more like some Southern Italian bodge job. Mudslides and rockfalls bloked half the road width in places and nobody had bothered to clear them. As Basil tackled hairpin after hairpin, the road got narrower. At times there was no room for two vehicles, but luckily it was lunchtime and the road was quiet.
Eventually, after an hour of slow climbing we rounded a bend to find that half of the road had collapsed down a cliff edge and the diligent roads department had simply lined the edge with concrete blocks. The resulting road did not look wide enough for Basil. We stopped and got out. I measured Basil’s girth using paces. One, two, three. I then went to the remaining road – one, two, and a bit! No Basil was not going to fit.
I think Basil’s too fat
That’s a nasty drop!
The next problem was how were we going to turn round. Again I measured Basil. He was eight paces long. The road was nine paces wide. Result!! With a quickly executed twenty point turn, with Sarah making sure I didn’t reverse Basil over the cliff, and we were heading one hour down hill to the coast.
At one point we pulled over for lunch. I got out to take some pictures and a small three wheeler pickup, which the Italians use for their small businesses, came sailing past me with his engine switched off. He was coasting down the hill. Given the precipitous nature of the road, I hope his brakes were good.
We eventually reached the coast, nerves shredded. Luckily the journey round Italy’s toe on the coast road, uses another piece of Italian engineering brilliance, with a dual carriageway carved straight through the coastal mountains. Tunnel, bridge, tunnel, bridge, ad infinitum. A nice contrast to the mountain pass.
We arrived at the ACSI site Camping Mimosa in the late afternoon. It looks a lovely site, right on a huge, clean, sandy beach. Out at sea is the vague outline of Stromboli, another of Italy’s active volcanoes. At the moment it is indistinct, but maybe the morning light will make it clearer, as it did for Etna this morning.