Tropea packs its pastel palaces and cobbled lanes onto a sandstone headland sixty metres above the sea, on the Tyrrhenian coast of Calabria in southern Italy, and the whole town faces one way. Stairways drop from the streets and put you straight down on pale sand, where the water shelves away clear enough that the pebbles under your feet seem to float. Standing off the beach on its own crag is Santa Maria dell'Isola, a monastery reached by steps cut into the stone, which take you past hollows in the rock to the church and the garden behind it. From the terrace at the top the two beaches, the cliff and the town along its rim finally line up for you. The crag was an island once. Nobody built a causeway out to it — currents along this shore kept dropping sand at its foot until the strait behind silted up and the beach met the rock. The name never caught up.
The soft stone is a standing condition rather than an event. The cliff sheds slabs of sandstone, and where the shore at its foot is fenced off the ground behind the fence is still moving. Inland the corso runs between pastel facades and iron balconies to a small clock tower. In the cathedral two unexploded aircraft bombs stand at the entrance to the nave. Six were dropped on the town in July 1943, they buried themselves in a garden where children were playing, and not one went off; examination afterwards found them all in working order. The gelaterie along the corso serve the sweet red onion that carries the town's name as ice cream, closer to jam than to salad. Then, forty minutes before the day ends, the town collects at the seaward railing of Piazza del Cannone, the square it keeps for facing the sunset. Stromboli sits low on the horizon sixty kilometres out. On a handful of evenings in late April and late August the sun does not go down beside the volcano but into its crater — the alignment Calabrians call the sunset of Ulysses.