Nice to meet you! I'm Patrizia Costa

Every summer I spent with my grandmother Maria in Calabria, she had one rule: I wasn't allowed to speak to her in anything but dialect. She wasn't being sentimental about it — she wanted a granddaughter who belonged to this place, not just visited it, even though I was growing up mostly in Milan and later the U.S.

My uncle Giuseppe, an art historian who taught in Vibo Valentia, did his part too. He took me to see the Riace Bronzes in Reggio Calabria as a girl, newly restored and on display for the first time after a real fight over whether they'd even stay in Calabria — and when they did, he stood in front of them, put a hand over his heart and murmured "finalmente, finalmente." I was too young to understand much of what he tried to impart back then about Calabria's illustrious Greek past, its rich cultural patrimony, or the Byzantine churches and Norman castles scattered across these hills. But a seed was planted.

Between the two of them, I suppose the outcome was inevitable. I became an art historian myself — I teach at Sotheby's Institute in New York and do research at the University of Pittsburgh on Italian art, most recently a book on Leonardo da Vinci, The Duke's Trees. Lately my research focus has pulled me toward something more particular: how travel writers from the age of the Grand Tour to this day have written about southern Italy, which places they sent people to see, and which they've been silent about. Calabria was almost always the one left out. The Touring Club Italiano (Italy's most respected travel guide publisher since 1894) published its first-ever standalone volume on Calabria just last year — after more than a century of folding the region into books about its neighbors!

That neglect is exactly what's actively reversing now, and it's what I love sharing with a group. A winemaker above Pizzo who brought back grape varieties nobody had grown in a century — critics in New York can't stop writing about them now. A family in San Floro reviving silk-making by hand. Writers and musicians keeping dialects alive that nearly vanished. A coastline still wild because a well-respected fiction writer spent years convincing locals not to sell it. These are the people and places I want you to meet — proof Calabria never stopped being itself.

If you're looking for a quiet revolution instead of the Disney version of Italy — real people building something on their own terms, not a performance staged for the tour buses — Calabria is where it's happening. And I’d love to be the one who shows it to you.

And then there's the fun of it. Some afternoons we shape pasta by hand, flour and laughter everywhere. By dinner, wine flowing, we're swapping stories from the day, trading bites off each other's plates, planning tomorrow. Some of my favorite friendships started exactly like this — over a shared plate, a debate about whose nonna’s recipe for sauce is best, a bottle of something local none of us had heard of before that night. That's the part I love most: not just seeing Calabria, but falling for it together.

When I'm not in Calabria, I'm home in Pittsburgh with my two mischievous Portuguese Water Dogs, Captain and Gracie.

Our 2026 trip was the best one yet, and I'm already working on 2027 — come join me.

Certified Travel Advisor with Fora Travel