Calabrian chili: Hot weekend at the Mar Tirreno

Calabrian chili is a local delicacy and Calabrians can sniff their way to the strength of chili on the Scoville scale. According to a chili vendor I met along the road.

Calabrian chiliCalabrians are fond of their peperoncini. Every gas station sells chili pepper vines, earthenware dishes with chili motifs, chili sauces with scary names such as bomba calabrese, strong ndjuja sausages with chili taste, grappa with chili , etc., etc. Consequently, it does not come as a surprise that a town like Diamante this weekend hosts a Chili  Festival for La cultura piccante, as they say. From the 9th-13th September, the town wallows in photo art, street theatre, concerts and gourmet cuisine with chili as a more or less far-fetched common denominator. There will even be an exhibition of 800 different chili of varying strength. Left-over beachgoers are in for a truly hot weekend at the Mar Tirreno.

Perhaps they will learn to sniff their way to the strength of chili according to the Scoville scale, like a Calabrian chili vendor tried to teach me a few months ago. He was standing by the side of the road with a van filled with yellow, red and orange chili peppers.

– Senti, he said, smell this, and lifted first one and then another chili pepper up in my face. Can you smell the difference? Some chillies are dolce, others are molto piccante and piccante, and the red one is sweet. It tastes of nothing at all, while the yellow one has a nice sting. The yellow are definitely the best.

Meanwhile, his friend tried to figure out whether it would be worthwhile to immigrate to Denmark to find unskilled work in a factory.

You cannot support a family by cultivating chili fruits, dragging them on a string and selling them for 5 euro per vine. Unless an initiative like the one in Diamante really succeed in making the demand increase.

If you like Calabrian Chili you might also want to try

Catanzaro in Calabria

Hiking in Calabria

One of the best beaches in Italy?


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Riccione Italy – Disco lights on the Adtriatic coast

Riccione Italy is a town south of Rimini which is famous for its discos, beach parties and the Spaghetti alla Carbonara

Italy’s answer to Ibiza can be found in Riccione just south of Rimini. Riccione is not just a derogative slang word. It is also synonymous with umbrellas in drinks and on the beach, amusement parks, power shopping and party all night. Over the last hundred years the town has been the bathing spot per se for the upper classes of Bologna, as can be deducted from the congestion out of the city towards the sea every Saturday and Sunday mornings during the summer months.

Especially after the Second World War, Italian and German tourists gathered round “the Green Pearl of the Adriatic”, led by Benito Mussolini, who in 1934 built a summer residence on the waterfront. In the 1960s a variety of celebrities such as Pele, Mina, Vittorio De Sica and Gina Lollobrigida followed suit by making Riccione their preferred holiday spot.

Personally, I think, Riccione is far over the top, but then I’m not in the target group for dolphinarium or discos. There are fine sandy beaches, but you have to walk halfway to Croatia to find a suitable swimming depth and a regular ocean of people in the summer months makes it difficult to move around. The city centre consists of fashionable brand shops spread over pedestrian streets and a US-inspired mall in tiles and cast concrete. And there are so many hotels, holiday apartments and campsites that you feel slightly cramped.

The most interesting aspect as regards Riccione is perhaps the town’s claim on the invention of Spaghetti alla Carbonara, the pasta course where a few eggs and some fried pancetta or bacon is spread over a plate of steaming spaghetti just before serving. According to Wikipedia pancetta and eggs were virtually the only groceries to be bought on the black market in Riccione in 1944, so the chef at the Hotel des Bains served these with inspiration from a Slovenian recipe.

However, there are also those who maintain that the recipe is much older, and that it came from Lazio and Abruzzo, where charcoal-burners brought it from home in their lunch box, and therefore gave name to the dish. Others argue that this kind of preparation originates in the Carbonara district on the outskirts of Bari. And then there are those who insist that Carbonara is simply a reference to black pepper resembling coal dust when grinded over the pasta.

All this is of course irrelevant in relation to Riccione, but it adds spice to a sunny, but in my opinion slightly unsavoury, spot in Emilia Romagna.

Other things to see and do around Riccione Italy

San Marino: Old republic in the heart of Italy

Cesena Italy : Old books and barflies

Rimini for children


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Elephants in Catania

The elephants in Catania have become a local landmark as shown by the position of u Liotru landmark in the heart of the Sicilian city.

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Puglia and the traditional Tarantella dance

Pizzica is traditional folk music that springs from Salento’s vines and tobacco plants. Accompanied by Tarantella dance to cure bites from poisonous spiders



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Photo of the Sassi district in Matera

The Sassi District in Matera

In the Sassi district in Matera there are cave dwellings leading back to the first human settlements in the world.

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