keyitaly.com’s blog

With UK and other foreign buyers of property in Italy gradually pushing away from the tried and trusted (after all there are only so many unrestored Tuscan farmhouses and barns left unrestored) the regions of the south are increasingly popping up on the radar. Buyers have been showing interest in Calabria Italian property which offers considerably better value per square metre, and also has miles of unspoiled coastline. This is the ‘toe’ of Italy, and you’re never that far from the sea (with Reggio Calabria it also has the embarkation point for ferries out to Sicily of course), and the infrastructure is well developed.

Tourism in the region has kicked off considerably in recent years - as well as lovely coastline there are beautifully rugged inland mountains, and not too far from the beach. As ever in Italy, development on the seaboard isn’t unequivocally good, there have been some pretty nasty developments, but the Calabrian coastline is largely unmarred by the worst type of Mediterranean developments. There are good clear and very warm waters (legendary Italian poet Gabriele d’Annunzio called the coastline by Reggio Calabria ‘the most beautiful kilometre in Italy’. Scilla, on the Tyrrhenian coast, is quite lovely and the setting for some of Homer’s stories; there is Capo Vaticano on the Tyrrhenian too, which has terrific swimming near Tropea. Squillace manages to combine seaside resort and archaeological site, while Stilo has a superb Norman castle and Byzantine church.

This is a theme in Calabria - the best of the modern resort alongside impossibly ancient relics: this was, after all, a centre of Magna Graecia, and thousands of years of history are ever around you. In our continuing pieces on Calabria Italian property, we’ll be looking in greater depth at some of the loveliest towns, both on the coast and in the mountains of Calabria.

Calabria property