73 km north east of Catanzaro. A featureless town on a flat promontory where industry, notably Montecatini Chemicals, has obliterated the classical heritage. Hard to believe that Milo, the strong man of Greek legend, was born here (he died trapped in the fork of a tree he was splitting with his bare hands) or that Pythagoras, mathematician and philosopher, lectured in a Crotone temple to the esoterics (‘inside the curtain’) and the exoterics (‘outside the curtain’) – the semi-soundproof curtain excluding the riff-raff from too much dangerous learning.

The sea is clear on a smooth curving gulf with gently-shelving sand. On the stony headland of Capo Colonna, 11 km south, the last surviving column of a gigantic Greek temple points a weathered finger at the sky. Round the corner on the so-called ‘lsle’ of Capo Rizzuto you drop into a time-warp of Arcadian innocence. You meet herds of ribboned goats, kerchiefed toddlers in charge of them, farmers in broad-brimmed hats on high-wheeled carts. Crimson clover and yellow marguerites cover the pastures and the paintwork of small dwellings repeats the colour scheme. The ‘lsle’ is edged with firm sands across which you walk to the shell of a great sandspit fortress, a relic of an Aragonese early-warning system. You might suppose that its builders were the last people to disturb Capo Rizzuto’s idyll. The inhabitants’ manners match their life-style. After we had persuaded some young girls to be photographed one of them whispered: ‘Do we have to pay anything?’