Festivals that come from a long way back
Greek rites, Albanian rites and village fairs: the Calabrian calendar is older than it looks.
Calabria has kept its festivals better than most regions, and the reason is the same one that kept two minority languages alive: isolation. The Arbereshe communities, who arrived from Albania in the fifteenth century, and the Greek-speaking villages of the Aspromonte have kept alive rites that were lost elsewhere.
The Arbereshe communities
There are some thirty villages, almost all in the Pollino and around Cosenza: Civita, Lungro, San Demetrio Corone, Frascineto. Arbereshe, a form of old Albanian, is still spoken, and the Greek-Byzantine rite is still followed. The most visible festivals are those of Easter, with their songs and traditional costumes, and the vallje, the line dances held in the days that follow.
The Greek-speaking area
On the Ionian side of the Aspromonte, Calabrian Greek survives, spoken in a handful of villages: Bova, Galliciano, Roghudi. The occasions when the language comes out in public are few but real, and they revolve around the patron saints' days and the summer folk music festivals.
A summer of village fairs
From July to September there is no village without one. The calendar is built around produce: onions at Tropea, chilli at Diamante, swordfish in the villages on the Strait, mushrooms and potatoes in the Sila at the end of summer. They are street festivals, you eat standing up and you spend little.
Tarantella
In Calabria the tarantella is not a folkloric memory but something still danced, especially around Reggio and in the Serre. In summer the festivals devoted to it fill the squares, and the difference from a show put on for tourists is obvious at once: the people dancing do it because they know how.
Dates change from year to year, and many festivals move to the nearest weekend. It is worth asking at the campsite or at the town's tourist office: this is information that circulates locally more than online.