Summer Letter: On Finding Love and Returning to Calabria’s Wild Coast

Photo by Rachael Krause

A third-grade prophecy, a Long Island psychic, and a beach house in Calabria that somehow, impossibly, was always the plan. Victoria Reed finds a version of home she didn't know she'd inherited.

Calabria, August

Four years ago, during the few anxious weeks when I was awaiting my visa approval to officially move to Italy, I happened to unearth a 3rd-grade journal in which I blissfully recounted my dreamy August spent in Rapallo that year. My very first of what would turn out to become quite a few Italian summers. Naturally, the entry concluded with a very resolute, “I want to live there when I am older.” Italian summers will do that to you.

I can’t say that I kept that little wish close in mind. After many wonderful years in NYC and later Mexico City, I had next to zero thoughts of packing up and moving to Italy next. Paris? On the radar. London, for sure. Yet somehow, here I am, waking up in my Italian husband’s family beach house in Calabria, happy as a little vongole.

Giampaolo and I met during a fortuitous month-long solo stint I was spending in Rome. I had just lost my dad, was in the midst of a pretty major spiritual reset, and was dating again for the first time in about a decade, when a Long Island psychic, who once worked for the NYPD assisting the forensics team, told me that I was meant to go to Rome. She added her emphatic personal opinion: “Italian men are the real stallions.” So I put Paris on hold.

He and I made a record together shortly after meeting, fell deeply in love, and moved in together (true love and musical chemistry - nothing could stop me) all before realizing that his Calabrian father’s birthplace, Stilo, is just about 45 minutes down the coast from where my Calabrian great-grandfather was born, in Careri. The current family beach house is situated nearly smack-dab, poetically, in the middle.

Calabria, as it turns out, has a strong pull.

Photo by Rachael Krause

I often describe Calabria as the Mexico of Italy. It’s wilder than the Italy most people know, with a raw magic you don’t quite feel in the more manicured, tourist-ready parts of the country. The Ionian Coast in particular, while less overtly photogenic than the Tyrrhenian (its more epic, cliff-lined, Instagrammable counterpart), is like some magical combination of arid Oaxacan mountain landscapes and crystal-blue, idyllically gentle seas. I love the rugged Oaxaca coast and its formidable tides, but I don’t quite have the constitution for surfing, and having grown up partially in Miami, I’m admittedly most at home in the kinds of seas you can almost take a nap in. So this particular combination is a win-win in my book.

The coast is somewhat unromantically dotted with slightly trashy, yet perfectly classic, little beach towns. Unfinished houses are, as I’ve learned, a thing, a philosophy, completely intentional, a way of life. Each town is set about 15 minutes apart with the occasional little reed-roofed roadside fruit stand in between. Look one direction, and you have a perfect sea with water the color my sister’s husband once described as “Barbicide blue” (lol look it up). Glance inland and you’ll find rugged, sun-baked foothills giving way to Arcadian green mountains peppered with the occasional medieval castle, citrus groves, ancient ruins, and a few incredibly magical, destination-in-themselves-worthy towns. One of which being Stilo, my father-in-law Salvatore’s hometown.

Stilo is considered by those in the know to be one of the most beautiful towns in Calabria, if not Italy in general. Once in a while, we’ll drive there with him to visit Giampaolo’s impossibly gracious aunt, or simply so he can shoot the shit with his old buddies. His brother was the most revered doctor in town, a local celebrity of sorts, and Salvatore’s a bit famous in these parts by proxy alone. We bring bottles, stock up on the town’s spring water, squeeze in a controversial pre-lunch pistachio gelato (amongst the best I’ve had in my life), and hike up and down the clifftop cemetery. Usually in scorching midday heat, while he says a sweetly unceremonious “ciao” and delivers flowers one by one to the several family members laid to rest there. Blood is everything around here.

I often wonder how my great-grandfather, who died before I was born, would feel about having made his way across the Atlantic to the United States, only for me to follow my heart directly back to the place his parents were so desperate to leave. My mom’s stories passed down from him describe some pretty bleak circumstances, and upon visiting Careri, the town where he was born, it doesn’t seem to be an exaggeration.

Photo by Rachael Krause

Careri, much like Stilo, is set in an incredibly picturesque mountain landscape, with winding cobblestone roads and romantically framed views towards the Ionian. Yet, despite its considerable beauty, poverty and lack of opportunity in the early 1900s drove waves of people from the region, and from this town in particular, to emigrate. Today, the old center is almost completely abandoned, with some houses mysteriously preserved, doors left wide open (as if everyone had left in a goddamn rush!), and the only real signs of modern life are several murals quoting Francesco Perri, the writer born there in 1885, whose best-known novel, Emigranti, chronicled the very poverty, land struggles and mass departure that shaped places like Careri.

While my great-grandfather built a pretty amazing life for himself in the U.S., I still can’t imagine he would be too disappointed to learn of my fateful return to this objectively beautiful place. In some way, representative of the ultimate success and later unraveling of the American dream, it strikes me as some kind of serendipitous triumph that, years later, I, as his descendant, could be privileged enough to return by choice and bathe in those same seas. This time just chillin’.

Summer days here follow a sweetly predictable rhythm. I often wake up just as the sun rises over the horizon, just in time to close the terrace shutters and sneak in a few more hours of sleep (I also come from a long line of big sleepers, much to the bafflement of my old-school Italian in-laws). Then, a late-morning crystal clear water swim in the for that psychophysical reset that I’m convinced only full immersion in a beautiful body of water can provide.

We lunch on the veranda, always rich in fresh-as-it-gets produce, masterfully cooked if my mother-in-law is in town. After, a slightly sweaty afternoon nap, maybe a venture down the road for some hot Calabrian sausage from the strangely cool (as by accident) local butcher. When Salvatore is at the house, there’s always a steady stream of interesting visitors drifting in throughout the day, bearing crates upon crates of world-class figs, prickly pears, Tropea onions and local cured meats. He’s 100% in his element here, and it’s a legitimate joy to witness.

We always head to the beach an hour or two before sunset for a long swim when the water transforms into an iridescent, almost petroleum-like, mermaid-shaded dream until literally everything and everyone looks beautiful. Giampaolo grew up summering here, with all the classic Italian coming-of-age magic that went along with it, and I swear something extra sexy becomes of him when we’re here. He appears like some perfect invention of my teenage imagination when, seated on the beach with my little dog, pulling my tarot cards amidst the gossiping Italian grandmothers, I watch him emerge out of the water like some slightly boyish Roman god. The heavenly flattering light reflecting off the sea certainly doesn’t hurt.

Then there’s this incredible moment between twilight and dinner every day. It gives me a sense of ease in the world and in my body that will keep me coming back here for years and years, if I’m lucky enough to do so. I light the candles; my perfectly crafted Italo-summer-meets-Sade vibes playlist is absolutely flying. While everyone else opts for the outdoor shower in the garden, I opt for the indoors, to an American, totally awkward Euro-style seated shower-baths, which I’m actually learning to appreciate and even savor. 

Looking out the window at the cute deco pink ’80s construction house next door, I could almost be in Miami Beach, my original childhood happy place. The neighbors are bickering, and my Italian is still just imperfect enough that I can blur it into cinematic background noise. I’ve reached the perfect degree of sun and salt saturation, the kind that makes you a little sleepy in a good way. Hot Calabrian sausages are hitting the pan downstairs; that first evening glass of my in-laws’ magical homegrown orange wine (again, cool by accident) is waiting for me when I head down, hair still wet, in my oversized t-shirt. And I feel a deep, good sense of home.

Which, as a going-on-10-years immigrant by choice with no childhood home intact, is a beautifully welcome feeling.

Photo by Rachael Krause

In early summer, the moon rises directly over the sea in front of the house, almost always shockingly big and a rich orange. On still, warm nights, we’ll sometimes make the 10-step journey to the beach for a skinny dip in the sea, often greeted by bioluminescent plankton sparkling like little ephemeral galaxies around us, mirroring the shooting stars and the Milky Way above. Other nights, we watch the shooting stars directly from bed. I rearranged our bedroom last summer, against feng shui odds, in favor of a better view of the sea, and was instantly rewarded with this much-welcomed perk.

In August, when this tiny town, like every Italian beach town no matter the size, comes alive, I always insist on a stroll down the road for a gelato and an amaro on ice at the cheesy-in-the-best-way little town bar. Always good for a run-in with one of Giampaolo’s childhood friends, maybe even a mythical teenage love if we’re lucky; everyone invariably delighted by his apparent refusal to age, as if he’s some human time capsule transporting them back to summers long past.

This summer, we turned the dining room into a pop-up studio and spent a few evenings recording overdubs for a genius friend whose album we’d been producing for our label, Pom Pom Records. His three-year-old bopped and chattered about while I made my best attempt to cook dinner in silence (until the gas ran out and we had to go to the piazza for last-minute late-night spaghetti alle vongole). It’s the kind of house that lends itself to both creativity and doing nothing at all, solitude and the more the merrier.

But no matter the summer, the month, the guests, or the evening, I pretty much always fall asleep, balcony doors flung open, the last of that day’s candles still flickering, a beach-burnt-out, tiny dog on my pillow and wonderful partner at my side, feeling grateful as fuck for whatever I did in a past life to deserve this sweet little Italian summer dream come true.

Or maybe it’s all thanks to great-grandpa Pietro.

Either way, I’ll take it.