Friday, 13 October, A drive along the Amalfi Coast

Written 13 December 2023

The room was large enough to contain, besides the table and chairs on the balcony, a round table with two chairs right in the room.

At first glance, the floor tiles appeared to make up an unbroken expanse of repeats of the blue and yellow roundels with flowers in between, but I went to look more closely at a spot near the door where it looked, from a distance, as though someone had stepped on a purple grape. It was, in fact, a bird, perching on one of the flowers!

I therefore examined the whole floor carefully, and scattered here and there throughout the room, were individual and paired birds. I found eight or ten of them, and so far as I could tell, no two were alike! You can see a pair of them in the close-up at the right. Even in the left-hand photo, I found a trio of little black and yellow birds above the right-hand blue roundel of the middle row (but at the size I'm showing the photo here, you have to look really hard to spot them).

I was pleased to see on our schedule that the hotel was opening the breakfast half an hour early for us, so that we'd have time to eat before our 7:20 am departure by bus. Unfortunately, the maitre d' insisted on treating the buffet breakfast like a fine-dining experience, asking how large each party was and escorting them personally to a table exactly the right size (eliminating any chance of choosing a large table and inviting others of the group to sit with us, so as to get to know each other), seating the ladies, taking that party's hot drink orders and relaying them before returning to ask the next party. So we all stood in line at the door for most of that half hour, when we could all have simply chosen tables independently and gone directly to the buffet, which was quite spread out, and would have saved a lot of time.

The breakfast itself was good; the selection of sweet pastries was particularly large and varied. At the right is the hot bar, with eggs (scrambled and boiled), bacon, sausages, tomatoes, baked beans, and mushrooms. Throughout this entire trip, although they tried mightily, nobody managed to produce crisp American-style bacon. It was either limp or leathery or both.

The cold bar included yogurt, cold grilled vegetables, cold cauliflower, smoked salmon with cream cheese, caprese salad, sliced cheese, and cold cuts.

The cut and whole fruits were also many and varied. In the foreground are bowls of cherry tomatoes, radicchio, and (I think) iceberg lettuce.

The plan was a full-day bus tour of the Amalfi Coast, returning to Sorrento by a different route in time for dinner on our own. Unfortunately, David was still feeling crummy and decided to skip it and stay at the hotel. The road we were to follow is so hair-raising that full-size buses aren't allowed on it, so we were to ride in a special bus, the largest allowed on the route, and just large enough for our party.

On the short walk from the hotel to the bus, we passed this "space-invader-style" troubador tiled on a column.

The photo at the right gives you a first impression of how the road clung to the precipitous cliffs. Our driver for the day was a specialist; he does nothing but drive small buses along that road every day.

As we drove, Anna talked about the region:

• The Apennine mountain range runs the entire length of Italy from the Dolomites in the north to the toe. A branch of it forms the Sorrentine peninsula (where Sorrento is), dives down under water, then pops back up as the island of Capri (pronounced "COP-ree"), a limestone (rather than volcanic) island (the other islands in the Bay of Naples are volcanic). Several of our group had been to Capri the day before. Tauck offers a trip there to people who arrive early enough for our tour, which we didn't.
• She said the south side of the peninsula (and I think she meant the Sorrentine peninsula, not the whole of Italy) is limestone, the other side volcanic.
• Lemons are the life blood of the region. They grow almost all citrus fruits there except for limes. (Though I didn't see any grapefruit.) Every part of the citrus fruit is used; they even grind up the seeds to use as fertilizer.

• Chestnuts are another major crop. They use the culls from the chestnut forests in the mountains to build the frames holding the netting over the citrus groves (apparently, hail is a serious threat), first because the wood is free, and second because chestnut is notoriously durable and insect resistant.
• Olive groves were also everywhere. Just yesterday, they began unfurling the nets under the olive trees to catch the falling olives during the harvest.

Here are a couple more photos intended to give an idea of what the region looked like. Unfortunately it was a hazy morning, and in addition many of my photos are spoiled by vivid reflections off the bus windows.

Also unfortunately, I can't match town names to my photos, so the town shown at the right here might be Positano, or it might not. Positano at least looked a lot like that.

Positano was popularized first by Steinbeck in an article in Harper's Bazaar, then the young Jackie Kennedy visited it and sang its praises. Now it's a prime wedding destination, but many brides don't actually check out the situation very well in advance. First, parking is a constant problem. Second, the church is right down on the beach and not reachable by vehicle. Anna says many brides arrive, in full regalia, shoes in their hands, feet dusty to the knee, angry, and covered with sweat. We had views of the town but didn't stop there.

Off the coast in this region are three little islands called Li Galli (aka the Sirenuses), where Rudolf Nureyev used to live. After his death, his choreographer lived there. Then a Russian oligarch bought them and gave them to his daughter for her birthday. Before writing this page, I Googled them to see whether she still lived there, and I found that they are now available as a rental (from $300,000 weekly).

Here and there along the route were roadside stands selling local products. We made a rest stop at one. Next to it was this statue of Mary, which says on one side (if I've deciphered the Italian correctly) that it commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Virgin's appearance at Lourdes and the 850th anniversary of the "arrivo icona Bizantino a Positano" and on the other that it's a memorial to Mons. Angelo Rossini, archivist of Amalfi.

The stand sold fresh and dried fruit, including prickly pears (usually labeled "indian fig"). Anna says the latter are very popular here and are in season just now, and yes, we saw them in many markets.

A large section of their wares, though, were vaccuum-packed olives, as in the left photo, and packaged spice and herb mixes, as in the right.

In the photo, I count eight different varieties/preparations of olives, and other bins held many more. Around the olives, you can see plums, grapes, dried figs, risotto mixes bundled with wooden spoons marked "Positano" and "Amalfi coast," dried fruit, and three kinds of citrus fruit.

Five spice mixes appear in the other photo, including one intended for bruschetta, which the proprietor was giving samples of. We held out our hands, and she sprinkled a half-teaspoon of the mixture into each palm, where we could lick it up. It was so good I bought a package on the spot, and (back home in Tallahassee) we have been enjoying it tossed with pasta and a little cream. Yummy—tomato, onion, garlic, and herbs.

These packages of olives and spice mixtures turned out to be ubiquitous on this trip, very popular souvenirs almost everywhere we went, but I resisted buying more.

At the left here is another view, from the produce stand, of the road we had just ridden over, clinging to the cliffs, supported on stone piers. Anna says the road was built after WWII, so when the allied troops landed here, the road didn't exist yet.

At the right is the municipal elevator at Amalfi (I think); it goes down to the parking lot and beach area. We did stop in Amalfi, to walk around and shop for souvenirs. I found a little postcard-sized watercolor and a watercolor bookmark, both on hand-made Amalfi paper. Amalfi paper is apparently world famous. Anna explained that all the towns along this coast are built around ravines (as they tend to be everywhere, because that's where the fresh water and safe anchorage were available), where water power drove paper mills. This area had 77 paper mills in Medieval times.

Here's another picturesque view, back the way we've just come. Because the terrain around here is so steep, Anna told us that toddlers' first words here are not "mama" and "dada" but "step, step, step."

Another major product of the area is ceramics, because high-quality clay is found here. We stopped at a couple of ceramics factories and their stores. The store at the right here illustrates the steep terrain. Its door onto the road is through the retaining wall, at basement level of the building above and behind it. The products here tend to be decorated in yellow, green, blue, and white, we were told, whereas in Deruta, the other major Italian ceramics center, they use more red and a more "Renaissance" style. The local patterns feature endless variations on lemons, olives, and tomatoes.

The ceramic products ranged from wine corks with ceramic decorations on top to patio tables, and everything in between: easter eggs, bells, plates and dishes, vases, rather fanciful sea creatures, tiles with house number digits with lemons, and a variety of planters/vases in three sizes in the shapes of people's heads. Anna explained that a legend in Sicily says that, during the Moorish occupation of the island, a well-born young woman tended potted plants on her balcony and fell in love with a young Moorish man. When he betrayed her, she cut off his head and used it as a planter. The basil that grew in it, watered by her tears, was so luxuriant and fragrant that all her friends wanted a planter like it. (In an alternate version, her parents learned of their affair and cut off both their heads for use as planters.) Now you can buy planters like that all over Sicily and southern Italy.

Some of the ceramics had glittery mosaic surfaces, incorporating a lot of gold, and many other souvenirs were available: tea towels with recipes and maps, wooden spoons with ceramic handles, razors with ceramic handles, coral jewelry and cameos, t-shirts with nautical knots, "Amalfi," and "Positano" printed on them, olive oil and vinegar drizzlers with fish painted on them . . .

I thought most of the stuff a little garish for our "Scandinavian bleak" home decor, though a single plate might be nice as an accent piece. I was astonished at how freely our fellow passengers bought stuff—they were even getting patio tables and having them shipped home. (In fact, in the comments submitted after the tour, a frequent complaint was that we weren't given enough free time to shop!).

Starting on this occasion, and frequently throughout the tour, Anna reminded us to verify with each and every vendor that they shipped "door to door." Some tourists are apparently surprised, back at home in Arizona, to get a message from some importer in New York saying, "Your Italian dishes have arrived. Will you be picking them up?"

The second ceramics factory store we visited was called, of all things, Picadilly.

At the right is a sampling of the sorts of dishes both places were selling. Note all the lemons.

St. Francis is the one who popularized the idea of the Christmas nativity scene. All the high-quality clay in this region also lends itself to the manufacture of figures for nativity scenes, what the French call "santons." The idea has really caught on around here. Naples is probably the principal center of nativity scenes; santon makers are all over the place there. Along the Amalfi coast, whole towns contribute to very elaborate collective nativity scenes, which can expand into whole villages.

These two photos show such a display that was arrayed right along the road. It's looking a little run down in October, but December 6 to January 6 is the holy month—St. Nicholas's day to epiphany—and in November, the town will get busy and polish it up for that month.

As we approached Amalfi, we passed Sophia Loren's house (or one of her houses), shown here at the left. For one of their anniversaries, her husband, Carlo Ponti, had a funicular installed (on the far side, where it doesn't show in this photo) so that she wouldn't have to climb all the steps to the house when they arrived by boat.

I hope you can make out the little stone tower on the point of the promontory. Back in the day, small round or square defensive towers lined the coast, each within eyeshot of the next for signalling purposes. Now they've been repurposed, like all those water towers in last spring's travel diary of Belgium and the Netherlands.

The photo at the right shows our meeting place just outside the gates of Amalfi. The bus dropped us off there, then we reconvened there at the appointed time to go on to Ravello.

The modern concrete riprap that protects the shore comes in whimsical shapes, like the cubes in the left-hand photo and the "jacks" at the right.

Back in the Middle Ages, Amalfi and its surrounding area, which was a kingdom at the time, was one of the four major naval powersin the Mediterranean. Besides the production of all that hand-made paper, it was the jumping-off spot for crusades, so that created a big maritime operation. As a result, Amalfi erected a huge selection of monuments and a huge duomo to show off its wealth without actually bragging (although just inside the gate, a plaque reads "When the time comes to go to paradise, for the people of Amalfi, nothing will change").

Here, at the left, is the duomo, dedicated to the city's patron saint, Andrew. Spain was a major trading partner, hence the zebra stripes on the church, from Spanish/Moorish influence. Because Anna assured us that most of its beauty was on the outside, I didn't bother to climb all those steps to look at the interior.

At the right is St. Andrew himself, leaning on his X-shaped cross like a crutch, on top of a fountain. I found the female figure below him somewhat off-putting, with her two "fountains" spouting water.

Anna pointed out Andrea Pansa, supposedly the best pastry shop on the coast. Their dome-shaped lemon delight, sponge cake with lemon cream, is the pope's favorite. A surprising number of our group stopped there for a snack, even though next on the schedule was lunch in Ravello.

I spent my time walking around the town, shopping for the above-mentioned watercolors on local paper, and watching all the shops and eateries and snackeries opening up. A fair number of the other tourists walking around were speaking Italian. Shops were thick on the ground, offering sorbet, especially lemon sorbet, gelato, spices and spice mixes, olives, limoncello, cheeses and ham, and fruits and vegetables. The fruit stand here offered kiwi, avocado, white-fleshed peaches, citrus, figs, plums, golden tomatoes, apples, pears, grapes, bananas, melons, and a whole stack of cases of prickly pear. And in the souvenir shops, as in France, fridge magnets (calamita in Italian) were everywhere.

Back down by the meeting point, I got this shot of the monument to another favorite son of Amalfi, Flavio Gioia, reputed to have modified the Chinese invention of the compass into the form that we use today.

Then it was back into the bus for the drive to Ravello, which Anna described as being a lot like Portofino but quieter and less touristy.

From the spot where the bus dropped us off, to get to the Trattoria Cumpà Cosimo where a four-course set lunch awaited us, we had to walk up a looong straight incline. We all coped with it just fine, but I wasn't sure whether to be amused or horrified to find, at the top, mounted on a post intalled for the purpose, an automatic emergency defibrillator. Probably a wise precaution for the folks who have to climb it in July.

So that we could taste as many specialties as possible, each of the first three courses consisted of three items. The starters were a small bruschetta, a slice of excellent prosciutto, and a crescent of canary melon.

The second course, included pasta bolognese, lasagna, and trofie, a local spindle-shaped pasta, with pesto.

The third course was a small meatball with a thick, gnocchi-like pasta, potatoes with onions, and zucchini. Apparently zucchini is considered very seasonal around here, a specialty of fall cuisine. We found it featured prominently several places, and fried zucchini flowers were a very common starter.

Dessert was an exquisite lemon sorbet served in a lemon shell. I think the dark topping was black currant, which was good, but the sorbet itself was out of this world.

Ravello is home to the Villa Rufolo, a splendid 13th century private house that was once among the largest and most expensive on the coast and was set in magnificent gardens. It had fallen into disrepair and the gardens were overgrown when it was visited in 1851 by Scottish botanist Sir Francis Neville Reid, who bought it and restored both the house and the gardens. The plaque on the gate commemorates him (as "francesco Neville Reid) and Sofia Carolina Gibson Carmichael.

Richard Wagner stayed there when he visited the city and is said to have declared that "the gardens of Klingsor have at last been found." He was so moved that he was inspired to finish Parsifal, which he'd been working on for ten years.

As a result, the city hosts an annual summer Wagner festival and calls itself the city of music. It is also the sister city of New York, and for that purpose calls iself "The Big Lemon." The city sent a delegation to the 9/11 commemoration and even has a small 9/11 museum of its own.

I considered going in to tour the house and gardens, but I didn't really have enough time left, so I just walked as far as you could without paying the admission fee (see the photo at the right).

Instead, I walked around it to the left to a public walkway that had the same view over the sea.

The photo at the right is back up toward the house across its gardens, but of course you can't see much of the garden, hidden behind high hedges.

Along that public walkway, as you can see, they don't have much of a problem with people sitting on the edges of the planters.

This poster advertised the chestnut festival to be held in Scala, across the ravine from Ravello, starting the very next day. We just missed it.

Back at the rendezvous point, we walked back down the incline and once again boarded the buses for our return trip to Sorrento. We couldn't go back the way we came because that road is one-way for buses, so we instead turned inland, drove over the mountains that form the spine of the Sorrentine peninsula, and thence back to Sorrento.

More things Anna told us as we rode:

• The towns all along the Amalfi coast are connected by the Metro del Mare, a boat service that runs coastwise, some routes stopping at every town and others offering "express" service between the larger ones.
• In this area, on most public beaches, bottoms are required but tops are optional. A few are "naturalist" (i.e., nude) beaches. The "trikini" has been described as sunglasses, hat, and flipflops.
• A variety of large green olives are sweet. They come from Sicily but are now popular elsewhere.
• Italy united in 1861, then 10 years later took in the Papal states, which up to then had been regions ruled directly by the Pope. Needless to say, the pope was not pleased; he complained of being a prisoner in his own palace, which was in Rome. It was Mussolini who, in exchange for a more favorable view of his government by the church, gave the Pope his own country, the small area surrounding the Palace that is now the Vatican.
• The Sorrentine peninsula divides the bay of Naples from the Bay of Salerno.
• The umbrella pines that we saw everywhere are the ones that produce the pine nuts.
• She thought that they might be culling the chestnut forests in the mountains as we passed, but we saw no evidence of it. Things seemed to be running late this year—many unripe chestnuts were still on the trees.

Along the way, we passed this large castle-like structure, but I never got a chance to ask what it was.

When we boarded the bus in the morning, we walked downhill to it from the hotel. Cleverly, though, coming back, the bus dropped us off at a different place, and we once again walked downhill to get back! At the right here is a bust of Henrik Ibsen near where we left the bus. I forget the connection, but Ibsen was probably here.

On the way down the hill, Anna stopped off at the shop of a friend of hers who makes beautiful terra cotta nativities. She pointed out the way to the hotel for those who were eager to get back, then led the rest of us on a short tour through his showroom. Not necessarily historically accurate (maybe the stable roof in Bethlehem was covered with white oak leaves, but I'm pretty sure those prickly pear cacti don't belong), but beautiful.

The two shown here are quite large, two to three feet tall, and they must be astronomically expensive, if they're even for sale. In my photos of other cases, I can see the price tags on a few smaller ones—180 to 200 euros for something four inches high, 250 to 350 euros for something maybe a foot high.

Back at the hotel, I found that David still felt crummy and didn't want to go out, so for dinner, we just presented ourselves at the door of the hotel's restaurant, which was dark and empty despite supposedly being open. Eventually a waiter wandered by and mentioned that they were only serving outdoors that evening, under the lemon trees.

So we went down there, and were still the only people in sight, but somebody did appear to take our order. I think maybe one other couple showed up as we were finishing our dinner, but otherwise, completely empty.

Unfortunately, I didn't photograph the menu, and the meal was not exactly memorable, except for its oddness—the chef had more originality than talent.

The amuse-bouche was threefold: (a) a savory tomato-water baba with two kinds of tomato and fresh basil on top, (b) tartlet with strawberry gel on top of something and basil oil on top of that, and (c) a tiny lemon cake dipped in lemon juice and topped with a ricotta mix, I think.

The bread is shown at the right. I don't remember what the spheres on our bread plates were; olives maybe?. In addition to the usual quartered round loaf, we got grisini (long crisp bread sticks), tiny olive-oil crackers (to the left of the bread loaf), and two triangular crackers standing in slots in a rock.

I was hungrier than David, so I had an intermediate course (not pictured), billed as "cod salad," which turned out to be plain cold cooked cod flakes accompanied by a few black olives, a tiny dab of lemon mayo, little crackers in the shape of leaves, pea sprouts, lemon sorbet, and chocolate "crock" (whatever that is). Pretty tasteless without some lemon, more mayo, or something. Again, it was pretty but not especially good.

My main course was "crispy pork belly" (good enough, but not actually crispy), accompanied by everything in the kitchen: crispy fried pork skin, red bell pepper sauce, parsley and basil creams, hazelnut stuff, crispy pasta and potatoes, and cylinders of caramelized apple. Several of the components were tasty enough, but no synergism whatever.

David was served the dish at the right, and neither of us remembers what it was: stewed brown stuff with foam on top.

We skipped dessert.