A good story
Kalòs Experience is the brainchild of Alessandra and Pietro, citizens who love their land and who are active in a process of local development that has affected the village of Bova since the 1990s. In this dimension of "cultural inhabitants", they accompany guests who wish to do so not only in getting to know the beauty of their area but also in the knowledge that everyone is decisive with their own actions for the legally sustainable development of the place where they live.
In fact, the idea of doing tourism in Bova stems from a long experience of 'widespread hospitality' (by 'widespread hospitality' we mean the existence of beds in old rural cottages in villages that have remained intact architecturally, which are restored and combined with the presence of refreshment facilities) that began almost by chance in the early 1990s thanks to a few young people who founded the San Leo di Bova Cooperative.
This receptive offer peculiar to the area (similar to the English B&B model, the Alto Adige garnì model, the Greek studios model and the French chambre d'hotès model) differs from all of them because it focuses on reality as it is, without any particular changes to the building structure and morphology of the site (as could be caused by the construction of new receptive structures).
It also encourages local people to renovate their homes and keep the urban centre alive, so that they do not have to abandon it. In this way, the visitor has the opportunity to establish a privileged relationship with the host family, which allows him to come into contact with the place and its traditions more easily. In the meantime, the Region of Calabria has instituted the possibility of implementing the 'Albergo diffuso' hospitality formula in the villages, which is considered the future prospect for the evolution of accommodation in the village of Bova.
The 'widespread hospitality' experience has led Alessandra and Pietro to renovate an old house and create Kalòs B&B in family, a place where it is possible to discover an ancient sentiment, typical of the Greeks of Calabria, the Filoxenìa , love for the stranger. It is an ancient sentiment of respect and hospitality of the other, as the ancient Greeks understood it, the highest expression of welcome, a fundamental ethical principle to distinguish the 'savage and unjust' man, as Ulysses said, from the 'hospitable and just' one. A sentiment still widely shared in Greek Calabria and particularly in Bova, where the chance encounter is often consecrated with the sharing of food, wine and storytelling, because the person you meet could be a 'GOD' who has descended from Olympus to earth, taking on the appearance of ordinary mortals.
Filoxenia is something that makes Bova unique, Europe's finis terrae overlooking the Sicilian Channel, in those Mediterranean waters that preserve the stories of those who, since antiquity, have risked and still risk their lives for the dream of a hospitable landing place. Bova, also abandoned by many of its migrant children, has become in the last decade the destination of foreigners who decide to live there by recovering ancient farmhouses, and it is the daily destination of Italian but above all foreign cultural and naturalistic tourists fascinated by the Greek Calabrian culture and the beauty of the Aspromonte National Park, recognised in April 2021 as a Geopark by the Unesco Global Geoparks network.
