Walking versus Riding on the Amalfi Coast

Like a previous trip I have been extremely remiss in not staying current on these posts.  However I did use that wonder App called Track My Tour (please tell Chris that I sent you if you check it out) which did a much better job.  Here is the link to this part of the trip -- Click here.

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I've droned on and on about the narrowness of the roads and the large numbers of traffic on them in past posts but I don't think I've done it full justice.  Certainly we simply avoided the entire issue by not hiring a car and handing ourselves over totally to Daniele and his mates. In doing that we didn't have to drive, worry about other cars, worry about having a drink here or there or worry about where on earth we were in a land where roadsigns are to say the least open to question (if available).  For sure it cost us money to do that but on the other hand we were able to really enjoy ourselves and not wonder what some total plonker coming at us will do in that tiny gap in the traffic (hint: they won't wait and wave you on).

On the days we had no adventures we felt imbued to walk everywhere.  Being based just outside Amalfi itself, this was no real issue.  Had we wanted to go to other villages, both bus and water taxi were available but on the one occasion we tried the bus, it was full, the next one was an hour away and in any event the bus may not have been going where we wanted.

Further leaving early would certainly mean getting onto your preferred means of public transport but given the crowd numbers, that didn't automatically guarantee your return visit would be available to you.  So we didn't bother trying.

What we did discover is that the entire area is actually very small.  With headlands and mountains everywhere you tend to forget that the next village is only 1/2 a mile away and in any event the local inhabitants had found a short cut there years ago... over the top.

The short cut

That's what we did with Atrani, home to the best colatura pasta on the coast (according to who else but Daniele?  "Mention my name to the owner and he will..." You probably can guess the drill here).  Even though it was only 1/2 kilometre away (had we walked on the road around the headland) it took us over 3 hours walking up and down hillsides, viewing the cemetary on the side of the hill, various churches, monasteries and cathedrals and all manner of lovely stuff.

We'd meant that it would take us this time as we needed the exercise for sure after the wonderful food and drink we'd had.

We walked the Via Valle dei Dragone nearly up (a lot of steps and steep paths) to Ravello before turning around and strolling the lanes over to Atrani, a village with an 11th century cathedral that was in use for a family funeral... with 1,000 attendees (the village itself has 1,300 full time inhabitants and is the smallest city around).  Of course everyone in the village turned up!

The best colatura on the coast according to Daniele

The cathedral itself is right on the point where the coast road turns around over 90 degrees from Amalfi and with parked cars everywhere, it was a trial for normal sized cars to pass, let alone the two buses that came to a grinding halt facing each other.

This is the point where someone would normally reverse or say something like 'after you' but in Italy neither happen of course.  Both buses started edging forward gently whilst any Vespas in the vicinity nipped in and out of the cars and between the buses generally being thoroughly annoying and unhelpful.

Duelling buses

It was fascinating so we found a vantage and watched.

To us it was improbable in the extreme that either bus could pass the other given the space available yet within no more than 15 minutes of edging around that happened and the traffic started to flow again leaving me with this thought: if it doesn't work, don't worry.  Go to Italy.  It will there!

The view from the cathedral at Atrani.  Decidedly unshabby.

Despite itself seemingly, Italy just works... just. Don't ask me how but I love it!

We'd booked train tickets from Salerno to Rome for our departure and asked the landlord to give us a lift to the station (a service he does for all guests apparently) some 40 minutes away at the end of the coast road.  The gentleman in question was about 70 and had a car that was quite old.  I'd spotted him banging something on or in the car to get it going before he'd announced his arrival. Clearly this would not be a luxurious ride like we'd been enjoying with Daniele and the others.  This would be a real local experience and so it proved.

The coast road winds through a series of little villages and in one of them there was quite a long promenade for the region.  That meant people walking along a sea walk and... wait for it... pedestrian crossings.  We'd seen how pointless these were in Naples already on this trip and experienced for ourselves that feeling of 'will they won't they' when cars approached the crossing that we were thinking about crossing.  Random results.  Some stopped, others didn't.

Traditional traffic.  Plenty of room to pass.

At this village there were several such crossings and quite a lot of people around.  At one an elderly couple, one with either a walking stick or zimmer frame was slowly crossing the road and our driver simply didn't stop.  Or rather it did but with a screeching of brakes and the car somehow stopping just and I do mean just before ploughing into this little procession.

Both were Italian as all around people started shouting, gesticulating and banging on the bonnet of the car.  The response was not a 'sorry, my bad' or equivalent, it was zero to total maniac in a nanosecond.  He started shouting and screaming too.  How I wish I spoke Italian!  I'm sure if he'd had a gun, he'd have used it.  Everyone by this point was totally beside themselves.

Then it stopped.  The elderly couple shuffled off and we started off again.  Our driver showed absolutely no sign of either remembering the incident or showing remorse over it.  It just happened and now it was over!  Had he been able to wash his hands like Pontius Pilate, I think he would have.

Like I said, I don't know how it works, but it does!

Mozzarella, Vino and the best view in the world!

Like a previous trip I have been extremely remiss in not staying current on these posts.  However I did use that wonder App called Track My Tour (please tell Chris that I sent you if you check it out) which did a much better job.  Here is the link to this part of the trip -- Click here.

**

One great thing about Daniele is his enthusiasm for life.  Everything is in absolutes.  The best mozzarella, the best wine in the region and the best view in the world.  All today!  Who couldn't be excited by all this?

Meet Daniele! On the left.

First stop along the coast road was half way up between Positano and Ravello on one of the many hairpin turns.  Of course being Italy there were cars everywhere, even here, but I suppose it was still just about walking distance from the jammed streets and lanes of Positano.  Easier to walk in and out than struggle with the traffic.

Not a bad view!

The scenic overlook was spectacular though.

Ravello as far as I can make out is the 3rd biggest attraction in this region after Positano and the coast road itself.  It is a very pretty little village but it is not at the top of the hills here like all the other high villages which were created as refuges from marauding pirates.  It is sort of about half way up and on either side of a ravine through which a river passes.  Swanky hotels are here a-plenty.  This is definitely the place where the rich and famous come.

The other side of the ravine with Ravello in the centre

Our purpose here though was rather more prosaic -- we'd asked for a day of local gastronomy and of course the local vino and this was it.

First stop was a childhood friend of Daniele who just happened to be the local cheesemaker but not just any cheese but the local mozzarella -- not buffalo milk, just cow this time.  His name is Biagio and he owns the local cheese factory... which just happened to be next to a bar owned by Eugenio, an Anglo-Italian who sounds more English than I do but whose family comes from Ravello.  And if there's one thing the Italians do well (other than pasta, cheese, wine...) is family.  The call home even if he'd never lived there was too strong.  Factor in a young lady also from Ravello and really there's not much chance Croydon has it over this little jewel of the Amalfi Coast.

Together they thought of starting up a hands on thing for tourists on a lovely shady spot opposite their respective business fronts also overlooking the spectacular ravine.

Viv and I were experts on Mozzarella now but have never actually handled the stuff which is what Biagio made us do.  The cutting, kneading and stretching are all pretty simple.  The stumbling block comes with tearing the perfect little balls you've made off the larger chunk of the stuff.  Mozzarella when stretched and kneaded has the consistency of rubber so to rip off the lovingly moulded little ball without mangling it beyond recognition did not come as second nature to us.  Biagio of course soothed our grumblings and said they were really very good, symmetrical and perfect to serve in any 5 star restaurant.

Biagio at work. Nest step is to tear the little ball off the dangly bits without making it look odd

Just to prove a point he went away leaving us to sip wine with Daniele and eat some little deep fried appetizers from Eugenio's bar, returning with a huge tray of artistically arranged mozzarella based treats.

He served our creations alongside his and looking at them arranged on a tray it did make us think how much they looked like a sperm.  Or rather the pictures of them you see in a biology book from school. Sort of like an early stage tadpole but that white colour.  I think I better stop here before this segment becomes too mixed up with the wrong kind of thing.  Really it was all about the mozzarella, not the... OK, you see what I mean.  Move on.

See what I mean?

The final word on the mozzarella interlude will come from Monty Python. Good luck Biagio and Eugenio.

The trouble with sipping a little wine with deep fried yummies and some odd shaped mozzarella meant that our immediate next stop at Tramonte in the mountains at yet another friend of Daniele's vineyard for lunch promised to be an all out assault on our stomachs and our very ability to keep going.  As it turned out we gritted our teeth and managed a good showing courtesy of a reasonable delay while they got things ready after we arrived.

The vineyard

This part of the region is actually over the hills and on the other side so has no sea view at all.  Just more pretty hills and valleys.  The region has been farmed since the pre-Roman era and is very fertile.

Our favourite was the rose

Daniele filled the gap by manfully uncorking wines seemingly by the gallon.  They were very good indeed particularly the rose which was a simply lovely colour, the same as the local roses as Viv pointed out.

Daniele is really something.  His background like so many Italians seemingly is the hospitality industry.  He has worked in hotels and restaurants and has a background as sommelier meaning he could talk with enthusiam and knowledge about the wines we were drinking.  The local varietals of course include some of the common grapes but many date back to Roman times which are very unusual.

Lunch was home made pasta with fava beans and veal with local broccoli and just the 4 wines: 1 white, 1 rose and 2 reds.  We of course agreed to buy a mixed case of wines to be shipped home which will probably make them the single most expensive wines ever once landed.  Ah well.  It was a great lunch and terrific time.  We just hoped the next segment would not include food or drink.

We made it to Ravello around 5 pm which was when things were gradually winding down and Daniele dropped us off in the central piazza which like many things here is on the side of a ravine and which is home to a whole bunch of tourist shoppes (of course), bars and restaurants and just down a little, actually not so little, lane to the Villa Cremoni which these days is a very swanky hotel.  However they do allow people to stroll around the gardens and take in the view which just may be the best view on the Amalfi Coast.

Ravello from the central piazza. Ravines everywhere!

That bit is right at the very end of the gardens on a long terrace with Romanesque busts of probably emperors or gods at every turn.

As for the best view in the whole world.  You decide.

The Jewel

Like a previous trip I have been extremely remiss in not staying current on these posts.  However I did use that wonder App called Track My Tour (please tell Chris that I sent you if you check it out) which did a much better job.  Here is the link to this part of the trip -- Click here.

**

Having taken one look at the road and even walked a decent chunk of it into and out of Amalfi from our apartment, the last thing we wanted to do was rent Vespas to scoot along the coast road like I said I'd quite like doing.  I've had a Vespa before in Bermuda and it was great and I could just imagine the Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn thing with Viv on the back and the wind through our hair...  But in those days there wasn't much traffic.

Norman castle on the way to Positano.  Never a shabby view in sight.

That's the thing for even at this time of the year which is NOT high season, the roads are pretty jammed particularly when the buses and coaches get going.  We'd failed miserably trying to work out when or even where the buses went from Amalfi even though we had tickets and Amalfi was a sort of terminus for buses in the region.  We discovered we'd either just missed the hourly bus, or it was full, or even that the direction that we thought we wanted was in fact the diametrically opposite direction.  So much for bloody GPS and no maps.  It may help you finding some place but it gives you zero idea of where you are at any given point in time or where anything else is in relation to where you are.  (Apologies for this digression, we actually didn't have a GPS or car at this moment so this is more of a general rant rather than specific to where we were at this time.  This was brought about more through total lack of the language rather than anything else).

So thanks to Daniele again who suggested he should take us up and down the coast but start early because of the crowds who started to arrive in the big coaches after 11 am or so.  By that time he said we should be up in the mountains doing some other really fun stuff and of course that little surprise without which no day is complete.

Sounded good to us so we hit Positano around 9 am when we could both find parking down town and be fairly tourist free (other than us of course).

Positano is the jewel according to many and it really is very, very charming.  Water taxis go up and down the coast all the time too so if we'd been a little more energetic, we could have done that too.  But like everything else they go only once an hour and after 10 am are jam packed full so getting on isn't guaranteed at all.

It is very steep though.  Very, very steep actually.  Far more so than other little villages.  I asked Daniele why it was so popular and he said that it was down to the Americans really who were stationed here in WWII.  There wasn't a road into or out of the village so it was accessible only from the water and was hence virtually deserted.  The Roman road went up in the mountains by-passing the village.  So the GI's built a single lane road into and out of Positano which was widened (Ha!) post war to two lanes and there you are.

One thing I found interesting were the Siren Rocks just past the ubiquitous Norman watchtower.  This is where the Sirens lived and tortured poor old Odysseus in mythology.

The specks are the Siren Rocks, not very big really.  Of course it was the wind whistling between the rocks that created the 'music' of the Sirens.  Mythology sounds so much more interesting than the reality.

It was said that it was the sweetness of their singing that lured sailors to their doom on the rocks and one of the three Sirens took a fancy to Odysseus so cranked up the volume.  He managed to avoid temptation by sticking corks into his ears and sailed on safely.  Great story.  Here's The Cream singing about it!

Local industry other than tourism (90%+) is lace and sandal making.  Every shoe shop had hand made sandals for 15 euros.  Talk about Sirens sweetly singing!  Torture of a different kind for poor Viv.

But what a cool and lovely place it was.  We have to come back and spend some more time there.

See Naples and...

Like a previous trip I have been extremely remiss in not staying current on these posts.  However I did use that wonder App called Track My Tour (please tell Chris that I sent you if you check it out) which did a much better job.  Here is the link to this part of the trip -- Click here.

**

We'd talked about it for quite some time or rather I'd droned on about it, that we wanted to follow the European red clay tournaments from Monte Carlo in mid-April through to the French Open in the last week of May and first week of June.  However life does get in the way some times so we finally agreed on a cut down version which looks something like this:

• 2 days in Naples
• 6 days in Amalfy
• 8 days in Rome for the Italian Open with a group of tennis guys from Bermuda and Canada
• 7 days in Portugal, bottom left part on the western Amalfi Coast
• 6 days in Paris for the French Open (just Viv and I)
• 5 days in England

That's about 5 weeks.  Fantastic!

I confess to being a little anal in that I really do like to know the whats, wheres and hows of the places that we are going to visit but what the heck!!

I'd never been to Naples.  Viv had but on a cruise ship years ago so our collective knowledge was rather light however I'd started to read the book called Pompeii by Robert Harris and a book about the fall of the Roman Republic so was in the right mindset for Naples despite its more recent history (and there is a lot of it) is really, really old.

The route in took us over the Alps!! Just beautiful.

Naples or Napoli for the Italians was Neapolis for the 7th century BC Greeks who founded the city and Napule for the Romans who used the region as a holiday resort as well as enormous port city (according to Wikipedia anyway).  Home to 3 million people these days, Naples is quite simply a mess and mass of steaming humanity... crammed pack full of wonderful old stuff and really tiny roads.

This of course means road congestion.  

Of course there can be no reference to Naples without reference to Vesuvius which is right next door. It dominates all landscapes being so huge a double mountain, these days.  Formerly it was a single peak before that famous explosion in 79 AD blew it apart and submerged Pompeii, Herculaneum and I am sure a host of other unnamed and unremembered places.

Our first view of Vesuvius

We'd organised as much as possible a driver for all occasions as there had been so many of those warnings about tourists being stiffed over everything.  I found Daniele on the internet, Trip Advisor and the various online tourist guides.  His company could provide transport and tours of the entire region but also he was a sommelier and provided culinary events as well!  Simple choice really. Daniele's website is here.  Do check him out.  He is great.

It was one of Daniele's drivers who collected us from Naples Airport and took us to our downtown hotel.  It was in a maze of little side streets but importantly just up the hill from the central square and the old castle that was the feature of this part of the city.  Not Roman but still 600 years old!  Just a snip in time in fact.

The day we arrived was cloudless.  This is the view from the hotel terrace with of course Vesuvius in the background and the castle in the foreground.  Naples has always been a significant port town.

There really wasn't much time to do anything more than have dinner so we took a recommendation of a place called Il Garum from the check in guy and strolled down the street to enjoy it.

Different cities and countries have dinner at different times.  Spain before 10 pm is unheard of.  Here in Naples, it was 9.30 pm so as we arrived an hour earlier we had the place pretty much to ourselves.  And of course it showed us to be tourists as well.

Dinner was spectacular and looking back on it one of the top 3 meals of the entire trip.

Linguine alla colatura d'alici

Local fare is seafood even though pork, boar and porcini mushrooms are popular local dishes too.  But this one is the #1 -- anchovy juice cooked into home made pasta with olive oil and garlic.  This one was sensational!  It is also very traditional dating back at least to the Romans.  They called this sauce... wait for it... Garum.  Coincidence, eh?  I think not.

I just love the local in season little strawberries called Fragolini served with lemon juice, local of course, and a little sugar which is mostly unnecessary but when in Naples... 

I'd really missed the end of day Gelato and was not going to get off on the wrong foot!

And the night time view over the city ...