This story originally appeared on the Gents Cafe Newsletter. You can subscribe here.
There’s nothing wrong with the ease of an all-inclusive; in many ways, that’s exactly what it promises. But on a trip through Calabria last year, we found that the holiday only really began once we stepped beyond it, leaving the gates behind, and moving at our own pace through places like Reggio Calabria, Scilla and Tropea. The resort gave us rest, but it was the decision to go further that gave the trip shape; replacing convenience with the unknown, and turning something comfortable into something memorable.
The first day, we did what we’d paid to do: nothing. By day two, my feet were already itching to go beyond the clean confines of the resort. We were in Calabria, a region we’d never visited, and we were experiencing it through tinted glass and chlorinated water.
So we hired a car. The resort had a desk, a form, and by the next morning we had a nice modern Citroën with working air conditioning—a must when traveling with a little girl whose tolerance for heat was less than her attention span. We loaded the pram into the boot, that faithful companion for when her legs tired (which was often), and set off with a few names pinned on Google Maps and the sense we were missing something by staying put.
Reggio Calabria came first. The museum held the Riace bronzes; two lifelike statues of ancient Greek warriors, their eyes inlaid with stone, rescued after almost two millennia under the sea. The staff didn’t rush us, and never made us feel that our pram was an inconvenience. We walked the seafront promenade afterwards, the strait shimmering between Calabria and Sicily. We stopped for gelato on the way back to the car, the kind that makes any other frozen treat you taste afterwards seem like a poor second choice. Pistachio for us, strawberry for our daughter. She managed three licks before the heat got the better of it, and what followed was spectacular—both her meltdown and the gelato’s, which ended up all over her…
Scilla clung to its rock like something out of myth—which of course, it is. The fishing village where Homer’s Scylla once terrorized sailors now hosts families selling souvenirs from shop fronts and old men mending nets by their boats. We walked along narrow shady streets, the ocean framed in between the old houses which sat right on the water. Later, we found a trattoria extending out over the sea on stilts, the sea lapping gently against the struts beneath us as the sun descended.
Tropea, perched on its cliff, was the kind of beautiful that defies description. We navigated the narrow streets as light turned golden, then found the steps; a long switchback descent toward the seafront (the pram abandoned back at the car). At the bottom, a crescent of sand opened beneath the cliff face, the water beautifully blue. We climbed back up slowly, stopping often, and when we reached the church at the top, its doors open to the golden light, the view stretched across the Tyrrhenian Sea in layers of cliff and cove.
For all the beauty, none of these moments were particularly convenient. I lost my temper trying to navigate and rewire my brain to operate a car in left-hand drive at the same time. We got genuinely exhausted navigating cobbled streets with a pram designed for anywhere but Italy. There’s a key difference for me between a holiday and a trip. One passes pleasantly; the other accumulates into memory. The resort may have given us the former, but it was the road beyond its gates that gave us the latter.
We returned to the resort each evening, sun-kissed and slightly dishevelled, and slept better and more soundly each night. The convenience was still there when we needed it. But it was no longer the whole story, just the place we returned to after that day’s adventure concluded. Comfort has its place, but so does choice—and all the best trips I’ve had live in balance between them.
