Calabria: The Region Italy Forgot to Tell You About

Calabria is defined by extremes. The Aspromonte mountains rise to over 1900 metres in the south. The coastline stretches for 780 kilometres, with the Tyrrhenian Sea on one side and the Ionian Sea on the other. The climate is Mediterranean, with hot, dry summers and mild winters, but the altitude creates microclimates that produce extraordinary agricultural diversity.

The result is a region where you can eat fresh swordfish on the coast in the morning and wild mushrooms from the mountains in the evening. Where the same hillside produces olives, bergamot, and chilli peppers. Where the food is simultaneously simple and complex, built on a small number of exceptional ingredients used with absolute confidence.

If you know one thing about Calabrian food, it is probably nduja (pronounced "en-DOO-ya"). This spreadable, intensely spicy salami is made from pork fat, offal, and Calabrian chilli peppers, the same peppers that give Calabrian cuisine its distinctive heat.

Nduja originated in Spilinga, a small town in the Vibo Valentia province, and it has become one of the most copied and most misunderstood products in Italian food. The real thing, made with genuine Calabrian chilli, aged properly, and spreadable at room temperature, is nothing like the firm, mild versions sold in most supermarkets.

In Calabria, nduja is used as a condiment, a cooking ingredient, and a spread. It melts into pasta sauce, enriches pizza, and disappears into eggs. It is the flavour of the region in concentrated form.

Our olive oil comes from Maierato, a small town in the Vibo Valentia province, the same province as Spilinga, the home of nduja. The town sits at around 300 metres above sea level, on hillsides that have been planted with olive trees for over two thousand years.

The dominant variety is Ottobratica, a Calabrian cultivar named for October, the month of harvest. Ottobratica produces oil with a distinctive flavour profile: intensely fruity, with a pronounced peppery finish and a slight bitterness that indicates high polyphenol content. It is not a subtle oil. It is an oil that announces itself.

The harvest happens in October and November, when the olives are still green or just beginning to turn. Early harvest produces lower yields but higher quality, more polyphenols, more flavour, more of everything that makes extra virgin olive oil worth eating.

Calabrian pasta has its own distinct character. The region's most famous shape is fileja, a hand-rolled pasta made by wrapping dough around a thin rod, producing a hollow, slightly irregular tube. It is traditionally served with nduja sauce or slow-cooked pork ragu.

But Calabria also has a strong tradition of dried pasta, the semolina-and-water pasta that travels well and keeps for months. The region's pasta producers have maintained artisan methods, including bronze dies, slow drying, and high-quality semolina, while industrial producers elsewhere cut corners.

Our paccheri and other pasta shapes come from small producers in the region who have been making pasta this way for generations. The quality is not a marketing decision. It is a cultural inheritance.

Calabria has historically been overlooked by tourists for a simple reason: it is far from everything. No major international airport. Limited rail connections. A reputation, largely unfair, for poverty and organised crime.

But this is changing. A new generation of Calabrians is returning to the region, opening restaurants and agriturismo, producing food and wine of extraordinary quality, and telling the story of a place that has been feeding Italy for millennia without receiving much credit for it.

We are part of that story. Every bottle of olive oil and every packet of pasta we sell is a small argument for paying attention to Calabria, for understanding that the best Italian food does not always come from the places you have heard of.