Tropea Culture

Tropea's culture is that of a small, proud, formerly clerical southern town now living on its own image.

The Madonna di Romania

The cathedral's patron is a Byzantine-style icon of the Virgin, dark-faced, credited with protecting the town — from earthquake, from plague, and in 1943 from two bombs. The bombs are displayed a few metres from her. Whatever one makes of the causality, the devotion is entirely genuine and the town's calendar turns on it.

The red onion

Cipolla rossa di Tropea has protected status and is grown along this coast in sandy soil. It is unusually sweet and mild, eaten raw, and turns up in everything from salad to jam to ice cream, the last of which is better than it sounds. It is a serious agricultural product and not a souvenir invented for visitors, though plenty of souvenirs have been invented around it.

The palaces

The doorways along the Corso — carved granite portals with family arms — are the signature of the old landowning class, and reading them along a single street is a quick education in who mattered here.

'Nduja

Ten kilometres inland at Spilinga they make 'nduja, a soft spreadable pork salami loaded with so much Calabrian chilli that it is bright red and genuinely hot. It keeps without refrigeration, which is why a poor inland village invented it, and it has become the region's best-known export in the last twenty years. The chilli itself arrived from the Americas and the Calabrians took to it more thoroughly than anyone else in Italy.

What it eats

Swordfish and tuna from the strait, 'nduja from Spilinga a few kilometres inland, pecorino, and the onion in everything.