A long region, and for that reason hard to sum up

Calabria runs lengthways, and almost every mistake first-time visitors make starts there. From Tortora, on the Basilicata border, to Melito di Porto Salvo at the tip it is a good three hundred kilometres: the same distance as Milan to Florence, but without any real flat ground in between. Anyone who books a campsite on the Tyrrhenian and then plans a day trip to Capo Colonna on the Ionian finds out too late that it is four hours there and four back.

Two seas, two ways of being by the sea

The Calabrian Tyrrhenian is vertical. The mountain comes almost down to the water and leaves a narrow strip where road, railway and villages compete for room: this is where the most spectacular stretches are, the Costa Viola above the Strait and the Costa degli Dei around Tropea, and also the smallest campsites, often on terraces cut into the slope. The water gets deep at once.

The Ionian is the opposite. The coast opens out, the beaches are long and the sand coarse or shingly, the sea bed shelves gently. This is where the region's larger holiday parks and most of its pitches are, often among pines. It is also the Magna Graecia side: Sybaris, Croton and Locri all stood here.

And then the mountains, which nobody expects

Three national parks in a single region is unique in Italy. The Pollino, shared with Basilicata, is the largest in the country; the Sila is a plateau of woods and lakes at twelve hundred metres; the Aspromonte is the massif that closes the peninsula, steep on every side. These are Mediterranean mountains: you can see the sea from almost every summit, and in July you go from thirty-five degrees on the coast to barely twenty at a thousand metres in half an hour of climbing.

The sea to sleep by, the mountains for the middle of the day.

The rule of thumb for travelling here in summer

How to plan it

The rule is to pick one stretch of coast and stay there. Three hundred kilometres of region cannot be covered from a single base: it is better to decide whether the trip is Tyrrhenian or Ionian, and at most move base once halfway through. From the upper Tyrrhenian you reach the Pollino and the Riviera dei Cedri; from the middle Tyrrhenian, Tropea and Capo Vaticano; from the Ionian coast near Crotone, Le Castella and the Sila; from the lower Ionian, Gerace, Stilo and the Greek-speaking villages.

The other thing to allow for is the roads. The A2 motorway runs down the Tyrrhenian side and does in half an hour what the Ionian trunk road takes twice as long to do: the SS106 goes through every town, has traffic lights and roundabouts, and queues up in summer. Anyone travelling by camper should take it slowly and not trust the times the satnav promises.