Ahhhh...

I have arrived in Tropea, officially the most beautiful town in Italy. If you’re asking me, and you’re reading my blog so I suppose you are, that puts it solidly in the running for the one of the most beautiful towns in the world. It’s an ancient resort town perched on a rock above the Mediterranean; we’re on the north coast of Calbria, which non-Italians would know as “the toe of the boot”.

In Italian, they distinguish carefully between blu, “blue”, and azzurro, “azure”. The azure is the color of a clear sky, and blue is a dark azure. Azure is not in any sense a kind of blue; it’s its own proper color. (Incedentally, the Italian has a similarly precise categorization of pork products, but that’s for another day.) There’s another refinement, turchino, which is darker than azzurro but lighter than blu. Though they’re etymologically distinct, you might think of turchino like “cerulean”, though I wouldn’t swear to their identity.

There’s another great Italian word, limpido, cognate to the English “limpid”, meaning clear, transparent, serene. Incidentally, it is completely unrelated to English “limp”, which is Germanic: “limpid” comes from Latin limpidus. There’s also the near synonym nitido, cognate to the rare English “nitid”—shining, clear, bright. (I’ll admit that I hadn’t heard of “nitid” until just now, but it’s in the Oxford English Dictionary with the qualification “rare”.)

This is all going somewhere: the sea is azure by the pale sand; further out it’s blue. The sky above is cerulean; the air and water, limpid and nitid, clear and shimmering. See, in Italian that would have been much prettier, just like the beach I’m on. There’s a reason this is the most beautiful town in Italy, and it’s not the architecture.

An Italian man just walked by and asked me whether I’m working. I said “yes, a bit”. He said, “c’e il mare, non lavorare!”—“there’s the sea—don’t work!” He’s right, but I’m not working—this is play.

The sand is large-grained, like tiny gravel. It’s soft, but not so fine that it gets into everything. It’s pale and glimmers in the sun like crushed crystal. I’m sitting in the shade of a little beach tree feeling the refreshing breeze. I forgot my water bottle at the hotel, but you can’t have everything. It really is disgustingly beautiful here.