October 24, 2015

 

Southern Italy (cont.)

It’s arreviderci Amalfi today.  We’re up early and up to breakfast shortly after 8:00.  Vincenzo is at the desk and Lydia is in the breakfast room so all is right with our world.  Neither of us are too sore after our long day yesterday which makes the trot up the stairs to the terrace pain free.  It is too cool and breezy to eat outside but the sky is bright blue without a cloud in sight.  Our spread is the same as the last couple days.  On day one it was a painful splurge as we had to try some of everything but now we have our favorites and eat slightly more intelligently.

Before leaving we still have one chore on the list—our tour of the Amalfi basilica.  The real tours don’t start until 10:00 so we have the place to ourselves.  That enables us to nose around with our own printed tour guide.  We have been through a lot of ancient churches and this one ranks right up there.  Its main claim to fame (outside of a thousand year history) is that it is the burial place of St. Andrew.  There is a pretty serious chain of custody that puts his bones under the main altar.  They have been there for 800 years, enough to make believers of us.

We do one more walk around town and then back for our final packing by 10:30.  Franco (our driver from 3 days ago and again dressed in a suit and tie) will be picking us up at 11:00 for a transfer to Naples with a stop or two in between.  It’s hugs all around with Lydia and Vincenzo—we have decided that if you stay at a B&B and don’t get a hug at the end you may as well be at a hotel.

It is straight up over the spine of the Amalfi peninsula heading north toward Naples Bay.  The distant sea and town views are breathtaking.  Exactly what you were promised in the guide books.  As we pass over the top, the views are equally amazing of Naples, Naples Bay, Vesuvius, and a dozen little towns in the valley below.  One of them, San Marzano, is the home of the famous tomatoes of the same name.  A good Italian restaurant in the U.S. would never use any other brand.  Franco pulls over for a couple photo ops.

The next stop, recommended by Franco and planned for, is a wine tour and lunch at the base of Vesuvius.  It is obviously a perfect setting in a villa surrounded by acres of grapes growing in the rich volcanic soil.  The wine tour is a hustle through a couple vines and a peek at some barrels in their aging vault.  The real deal is the lunch.  It is an antipasto of cheeses, tomatoes, bread, sausages and lots of olive oil (pressed on site) followed by a kick-butt spaghetti with local tomato sauce, all served on the beautiful veranda with a view of the Mediterranean.  We know it is a cliché to say that spaghetti with tomato sauce is different than the quick dinner at home but it really is delicious.  It is all wrapped up with a ricotta based cake and some apricot brandy to pour over the top.  Obvious there was wine with each course, 5 wines in all, and they were pretty good.  The last special reserve red was very good but we passed on the 28-euro price per bottle.

When we get into Naples Franco is in his element as he drives like a madman with zero regard for lane markings or rules of the road.  It helps to have someone who knows the ropes on your team.  We get to our next one-night-stand, Orsini 46 B&B at 2:00, a half hour ahead of schedule.  Gabrielle (male) buzzes us into the building where we get the lift to our third floor reception area.  This is a tiny operation with only three rooms next to each other off the small reception area.  We get all the details—where to go, where to eat, how the keys work, how breakfast works, the map and the pizza recommendation.  There is no discussion about what to eat, it is a given that in Napoli you will eat pizza.  We agree.

We take a quick peek at the walk around the harbor but since this will be our destination for later we go into the heart of the city.  There is a long pedestrian street that basically cuts the town in half going away from the water.  It is packed with people, entertainers, cops and every sort of humankind that may have washed ashore here over the centuries.  Some critics say Naples is a nest of thieves, murderers and other cutthroats who will cull out old Americans and have their way with them.  We find the city pretty exciting with a great energy and pace.  There is certainly grit to it but that is a feature of southern Italy as opposed to their learned sophisticates to the north.  This is a big city but it also has a small town ambience as people seem to know each other and can deal with the helter-skelter constant motion that surrounds.  There are little groups here and there playing Michael Corleone type of wedding music and another doing opera.  It is definitely a feast for the senses.

The city has 400 churches and something like 399 are Catholic.  We find one little side street that is all shops selling ceramic miniatures for your Christmas Nativity manger scene.  If you want to put your 3 wise men on Harleys or have Joseph baking pizzas they can take care of that too.  The big event of our afternoon is a pretty big protest march.  We can’t read all the signs but it is a collection of groups who are pretty much mad at everybody.  They are especially mad at the European Union as well as the U.S. but they don’t much care for Israelis or Nazis either.  They are mostly communist based from the signs we can sort of interpret.  High unemployment in Italy makes some folks a little edgy.

We get a couple of cold beers for our happy hour in our room before heading back out for dinner.  It is a nice stroll along the harbor, and again there are thousands of people out and about.  This is the hang out place for the teenagers but the older folks and families blend in as well.  About a mile down the harbor walk is Sobrillo, our host-highly-recommended-authentic-Napoli pizza place.  We score a table outside and try to check out the place mat/menu without a lot of luck.  Mary asks if they have something in English.  NO ENGLISH! 

It seems that all of the pies are different combinations of the basic margarita sauce, crust, cheese and basil.  Most of the differences are different tomatoes or different cheese.  Finally we get a waiter to give us a couple recommendations and we just say yes.  Is it good?  Yes.  The sauce is the magic southern Italy tomato sauce we have been raving about and the charred crust is a great flavor producer.  Is it the best pizza we have ever had?  No.  Maybe if we would have grown up here this might be the only way we would eat pizza.  Maybe we could have used some pepperoni and a mushroom.  We’ll get that in Rome.

It’s a mostly full moon as we do the Italian stroll along the water.  Still tons of people out as we were in the early dining crowd (before 8:00).  A fun Saturday night in a new and different place.

What did we learn today?  The southern Italian personality is a kick in the pants, in a good way.

October 23, 2015

 

 

High on Amalfi

Hello sun.  We’ve missed you.  It’s chilly and breezy this morning with quite a few clouds still around, but there it is.  Today is supposed to continue like this and tomorrow is predicted to be perfect.  About time.

Today is a repeat of breakfast from yesterday with Lydia popping in and out.  It looks like she also has some front desk duty today.  There are about 6 tables filled today, all couples, and it seems we are the only English speakers.  It sounds like mostly Italian with some German mixed in.  We have seen a lot of Germans in Croatia and here—these are their sea coast getaway spots and we have been told that they do like to travel this time of year.

We have discussed hopping on one of the buses or boats to see some more of the peninsula but quite frankly it will be the same.  We have had the island of Capri recommended as a don’t-miss spot, while others have said it takes tourist trap to a new level.  All things considered we choose to stay nearby and go inland which means go up.  We start at the official tourist office down at the harbor for hiking maps.  Vincenzo has given us some of his preferred walks, but he is in his 30’s and we’re not.  We don’t need 6-miles of hills and boulders.  Our mission is Pontone (Pon-TONE-ay), the little village that we see above us when we look up.  The lady at the TI also suggest a companion walk a little farther up along the river to a waterfall at the top and then circle back to Pontone, and finally to Atrani before returning to Amalfi.  She says two hours of steady walking, more with breaks.  Perfect.  What could go wrong?

Nothing so far.  We find the right trail right away with signs pointing the way.  Mary also finds little orange paint dots on the rocks in lieu of bread crumbs.  We start past lemon orchards on the top edge of town.  There are olives and some grapes, but this is lemon country.  The stores are filled with lemon candy, lemon pastries and lemon booze.  The lemon tenders are covering these trees with tarps as we go by.  We’ll have to look it up.

We’re following the river and the path is really very civilized, mostly carved stone walkways and steps up.  This is our version of the Thigh-Master.  It gets a little more rustic as we get into the woods above the groves but still wide dirt paths with little orange dots as we go.  There are the skeletons of old paper mills along this road as well as an ancient aqueduct.  We surmise that they needed the water from the river for their operations and built the mills along the downward path of the river.  The shells of buildings covered with plant growth is sort of like an Indiana Jones movie.

One little blip is the stream we have to cross by stepping on a couple rocks, but not bad.  The waterfall is not Niagara but it is a nice little reward for our first hour on the trail.  We’ve gone about 2 miles in an hour, all of it straight uphill so a reasonable pace. 

We find the trail to Pontone right away.  We continue up as we have to cross a ridge to get out of the valley we’re in and on to the other side.  There are some olive trees up here in the middle of nowhere and there is actually a person tending some of them.  A lot of questions are raised.  We’re now into up and down mode and the dirt path is showing signs of civilization as we get closer to Pontone.  The views down into the valley with Amalfi and the sea beyond are spectacular.  Wow!

Pontone is sleepy when we arrive.  Mary finds a “rustic” rest room and we pass on the opportunity for a break.  Now we’re about 1:45 into our walk and feeling pretty sassy.  We see the sign for Atrani and Amalfi to begin our descent.  This is probably a good place for things to start to go wrong.

Somewhere we miss a sign.  We turn left when we should have gone straight.  Bad mistake.  We’re still going down which we consider to be a good sign.  Our surroundings are getting rougher as we progress and we’re a little surprised because this is supposed to be a popular trail between Amalfi and Pontone.  Now we’re going down broken stone steps that are crumbling beneath us and for a while we are protected from sheer drop-offs by a user friendly barbed wire fence.  We can’t tell which way we’re going because we’re in deep woods and going back and forth on switchbacks.

Let’s get to the end.  Eventually we cross a river and go back up hill to a road that goes generally in the right direction and we come into Atrani from the opposite direction than we had intended.  It’s time for a beer break because we’re back in civilization.  Another half hour hike and we’re back to Residenza Luce with burning thighs and painful knees.  We wound up going 6+ miles in four hours over rough terrain, much of which was steeply uphill.  That’s compared to the 6 mile downhill hike Vincenzo recommended that we disregarded as being too hard.  Live and learn but it was another memorable adventure.

We’re pushing our luck and going back to L’Abside tonight for dinner.  Giovanna finds us a table inside next to the kitchen where John can watch the action.  We start with a tuna caponata and a bottle of red.  Mary has the lemon risotto with shrimp and John goes red tonight with a tagliatelle tossed with a tomato-meat sauce.  Everything is very good, very authentic and prepared with care.  It just doesn’t knock our socks off like the last two nights.  That’s what we get for going back once too often, but we console ourselves that it was still better than any other place we could have tried.

Ibuprofin is our night cap tonight.  We know we’ll be in pain tomorrow.

What did we learn today?  Pay attention, the devil is always in the details.

October 22, 2015

 

Aaaah Amalfi

The beautiful Amalfi Coast, bella bella.  The sea, the sunshine, the food, the ambience, the 50-degrees and rain.  Oh well, this one was forecast and was factored into our plans for today.  Rather than do any of the coast things that people do here our plan for today is to relax a bit and then wander about the village of Amalfi and try to soak up the local flair for good living.

This is the second of our two hell weeks on this trip, as much as being in Amalfi, Italy can be included in a hell week.  Earlier in the trip we had a series of one night stays which are miserable, and this week we have four of them.  There are some travel transitions involved, the night on the ferry, the traveling night at Villa Vea, one night in Naples on Saturday just because it’s there and we should have one of their pizzas, and then Sunday night at the Rome airport before flying out on Monday.  It can’t be helped and we’re used to it.  In the meantime we have three blissful nights here and we will enjoy every second.  The weather no longer has power over us.

The first thing we smell when we open our balcony doors this morning is bakery.  It is heavenly—hope it’s ours.  Breakfast is a lovely spread this morning.  It is usually served on the terrace of our B&B but today is inside where they have some tables and a beautiful view.  Again, meats, cheeses, perfect tomatoes in olive oil, prosciutto, homemade mozzarella, cheese omelets, pitchers of blood orange juice, croissants, cakes, breads, cereal, yogurt, fruit—you get the idea.  Vincenzo’s mother-in-law, Lydia, is running the room and is a nice blend of loving to us and demanding of her helpers.  She doesn’t speak English but speaks in smiles and hugs.  The room is full so we offer to come back later.  She says okay but then comes up with a different plan.  She says (we think) wait a moment and then has one of her helpers bring in one of the tables from the terrace, dries it off, adds chairs and we’re good to go.  Excellent communicator.

Mary is still working on bidet-laundry after breakfast for a while.  No hurry with the rain continuing.  We venture into a drizzle to walk the length of the main street from sea to cliff.  Paper production replacing papyrus was the ancient industry here and consequently this is home to the paper museum.  Apparently there are still paper mill remains along the cliffs but why in the world would they build them there.  As we walk the street there is the sound of rushing water from the storm drains below us.  We’re told that there is a river running down from the hills above and it flows directly underneath this street.  As we get near the top of the town we see the river as it begins on its urban trip to the sea.

Our trip uphill began a little short of the center of town so now we retrace our steps back to the middle and then on down towards the marina.  Up one side and down the other.  There are at least a dozen tour buses lined up waiting to resume a trip along this part of the coast for their customers.  The towns that dot the coast form a little string of pearls and tour buses and boats skip from one to the other disgorging their passengers into a frenzy of shopping, eating and gaping at the visuals.  In the summer it is literally difficult to move here and even now it seems very crowded to us.  Vincenzo tells us that it will slow down next week as we get into November but it never completely stops.  The tour boats are not running today because of the crappy weather which either increased or decreased the number of people in town—not sure.  We compare today to a summer rainy day up north when everyone heads into Nisswa for a retail bonanza.

We try to visit the cathedral.  It is a 3 euro charge and when we get to the ticket window the follow tells us they are out of the English brochures that explain everything.  We tell him we’ll come back when they get more.  We do a bit more poking around in shops while dodging rain drops and cars.  We mentioned that this street is a mixture of pedestrian zone and vehicle traffic and the two are interspersed.  For one long stretch of the town there is a stop light at each end creating a take-your-turn one-way scenario.  The uphill cars will wait for a couple minutes while the downhill cars pass, and then the lights will switch and the uphill guys can go.  If you are walking in the street you get into the flow of knowing which way to expect the car that will run over you.

It is almost 1:30, time for the shops to close for their afternoon break.  John is a little hungry, Mary not so much.  We stop at a little fish stand and John gets a fish couppa, a paper cone filled with fish pieces and a long skewer to stab them with.  His choice is the mixed shrimp and calamari. Mary eats a few of the shrimp and John eats everything else.  Mary gets a birthday card for Aunt Marianne and we join the Italians for our afternoon time off.

We do the main street stroll again after 4:00.  We snobbishly look down on the tour bus people but we were standing by the city gate when an older American couple walked into the main square.  The fellow looked up and said, “Wow, would you look at this.”  What a nice experience for them.  The weather can’t decide what it is going to do and we decide to watch it from our balcony until dinner.  A cone of fish only goes so far.

We think we should try someplace new for dinner tonight but Vincenzo was telling us today how his mother makes the eggplant parmesan.  It is a bunch of steps with a 7-hour wait between each to make it just perfect.  John also has his eye on the carbonara so we’re going back to L’Abside again.  Mary was taken with her anchovy and sun dried tomato spaghetti last night so she gets that again.  We sort of share the eggplant parmesan appetizer (Mary got one bite) and it was as good as advertised.  John’s carbonara was beyond perfect and Mary even raved about the one bite she was able to snare.  Another fun evening with Giovanna.

A quick walk in the heavy after dinner mist and off to bed.

What did we learn today?  You can’t speak Italian by saying Italian words.  You have to sing them.  There’s a melody involved.

October 21, 2015

We See Dead People

We want to get a relatively early start this morning because we have several things on our list for today.  First is breakfast with Angela.  It is cloudy but not raining as we make our way to the restaurant for breakfast.  “Our” table is set overlooking the fields and village with pastries, mango juice, yogurt, tomatoes, prosciutto and cheeses.  Angela brings out a basket of hot croissants as we sit down.  She apologizes for the bread being a little late—it is still baking but she does bring a big plate of scrambled eggs (courtesy of the chickens outside).  There is plenty of coffee “Americano.”  There is nothing we can say this morning beyond what we said yesterday.  This is amazing.  We threaten to stay which Angela welcomes because she needs help bringing in the olives.  It is really tempting.  Brother comes in a little later for check out and it is handshakes with him and hugs with Angela.  A memory for a lifetime.

We’re in the car by 9:30, a little later than anticipated but earlier than we would like, for the 2 hour drive to our mid-day destination, Pompeii.  We’ve read the book and saw the movie so here it is live and in person.  The original Pompeii was a prosperous port on the Med under Greek rule and then Rome.  It was an active trading site from around 200 BC but there have been folks living here for 6,000 years.  They keep digging deeper and deeper finding earlier and earlier signs of civilization.

The big deal of course is the event of August 24^th AD 79 when Vesuvius blew its top and buried this progressive Roman town of 20,000+ people under super-heated ash 20 feet deep.  For the last few hundred years archaeologists have been carefully wiping away centuries of accumulation to recreate life in this perfectly preserved window into life 2000 years ago.  As you walk through this city of significant size it is easy to visualize the scenes in the forum, basilica, amphitheater, baths, brothel, taverns, theater and homes.  You stroll the streets as if you were there then on the same rocks looking into the same doorways.  The big guy in Rome those days was Jupiter and he watches over his flock from a perch on the wall of the forum.  The sea, which is now about a mile away, reached the city walls and there are walkways up from a docking area for traders and visitors to come to the city by ship. 

It is raining of course for about an hour of our 3-1/2 hour visit which is getting to be a serious distraction from out activities.  We have umbrellas but it is windy so our pants are soaked through.  We are trying to read our guide, also soaked, and when we find cover for a second to set down the umbrella the wind kicks up and blows the umbrella into the first century.  Really, we’re getting sick of the rain.

We get a good hour of no-rain before we leave which allows us to find some of the last areas of real interest to us.  Inside the amphitheater (lions and gladiators) they have erected a pyramid that houses many of the human forms they were able to recreate from the eruption.  Many of the Pompeii residents were trapped in their homes when the ash cloud first hit and they were literally gassed and buried in place.  The ash that surrounded their bodies was eventually dampened with ensuing rains forming a sort of crust around them.  Their soft tissue deteriorated over time but the form of their bodies remained in the hardened ash and were used to make plaster casts.  That way the archaeologists were able to recreate the victims in their death poses.  Pretty moving for something that happened thousands of years ago.  We don’t think Ben Carson would have gotten out.

Now it is return-the-car time in Salerno, about 30 miles back down the road.  After we drop the car off at 4:15 we will wait for our driver from our B&B in Amalfi to pick us up at 5:00.  At 5:10 our host, Vincenzo, calls us wanting to know where we are.  We eventually decide that we are at Auto Europa and the driver is at Europe Car.  Two different companies a block apart. (We have evidence in writing that we gave them the right info for what it’s worth.)  Franco our driver does the death defying run through Salerno rush hour traffic and onto the more death defying Amalfi coast road.  This is a winding string of switch backs along the side of a cliff with spectacular views of the coast and little villages clinging to the hillsides.  He pulls into a little street strewn with tourists just as it is getting dark and we honk and nudge our way a couple blocks up to Residenza Luce. 

This will be our home for the next three nights.  We are greeted by Vincenzo our host and his son Marco (about 7 or 8) who help us carry our bags up a couple flights of stairs to a little reception area and our room.  The room is a two level affair with the bed up and living and bath down.  It is beautifully decorated with Mediterranean tiles and the latest technology (except no English TV channels).  We also have a nice balcony over the one Amalfi street that runs from the sea to the base of the cliffs about a mile away.

The family of the residenza also has a ristorante just down the steps and behind the B&B.  After Mary does a load of laundry in the bidet and we have a glass of wine on our balcony we venture down for dinner.  The hostess is Vincenzo’s sister,  Giovana, a very friendly lady who we enjoy throughout the evening.  We think she enjoyed us, but maybe that was the wine.  We have the bruschetta mista to start and then John gets the gnocchi with marinara while Mary orders spaghetti with anchovies and sun dried tomatoes.  After we each eat half of our pastas we swap plates and everyone is happy.  The liter of vini rossi della casa helping the cause.  This is the home of lemoncello so we each order one after dinner.  Our hostess says she will make Vincenzo pay for them so free to us.  The evening is molto bene.

It is a short walk before bed.  John catches up on computer stuff and Mary catches up on reading and sleep.  We have nothing planned for tomorrow so time to relax.

What did we learn today?  In spite of the obvious, the Romans of Pompeii really had la dolce vita figured out a couple thousand years ago.