The Land of the Never-Ending Gelato (Italia - Part I)

The Italians are a bit more laid back than the French, it seems, when it comes to the minor details.  Our very first stop in Italy was Lucca, a beautiful walled city in Tuscany halfway between Pisa and Florence.  Most of the town within the walls is off limits to non-resident drivers.  But no matter, Carol had scored us an apartment that not only was drivable to, but that also had a dedicated parking spot!  Or so we thought.  The e-mails were contradictory.  At one point during correspondence, it seemed that we had a parking spot for certain, but no way to drive to it legally.  Well, Marge (that’s what I’ve named our lovely disembodied GPS voice, in case you missed the last post) was tasked with getting us there one way or another, and we’d ask for the skinny once we met our landlord for the week.  We arrived without a fuss, sort of.  We found a path through the outer wall.  Our street was immediately on the right.  All was well, except that there was no address #8 on the road.  There were signs all over saying we couldn’t drive any further.  We should turn back.  Huge fines would be applied.  Your car is not welcome here, gringo!  One ubiquitious sign actually shows a man blowing a whistle, holding out his hand to you, with the “talk to the hand” palm in your face gesture, and with one of those big red circles with a slash through it, to boot.  OK, we get the picture!  Where are we supposed to park?  We found a spot, but were unclear as to whether it was legal without permit.  Our contact was nowhere to be found.  Now what?

We called her, she was running late.  “Yes, but are we even in the right place?  There appears to be no #8!”  “What?,” she replies, “Nonsense.  Just give me ten minutes.  I’ll be right there.”  “OK, but where exactly is ‘there’?”  She hangs up on us.  The language barrier is formidable.  So we wait.  The locals are giving us dirty looks, as we wander the street, looking for the elusive #8.  She still hasn’t shown up, and we are starting to think we are actually on the wrong side of town.  Maybe Calle Giovanni starts up again somewhere else entirely.  “We’re going to get a parking ticket any second now, aren’t we? That big France sticker on the bumper isn’t helping us blend in, is it?”  Ideas, people?

She shows up.  She leads us into #6.  We ask the obvious question.  The reply?  “Oh yeah, huh.  Sorry about that.”  Details, right?

We’re shown the apartment.  Great, it looks nice.  We ask about parking.  “Parking? No, there is no spot.  You can’t park where you are.  They’ll tow you away.  There is a pay lot about three blocks down and a free lot about a mile away.”  “But your ad said the apartment came with parking!”  Nope.  Sorry.  Details.  Well, as it turned out, there was a spot in the garage just big enough to house either a SmartCar or the four bicycles that were in it at the moment.  She was right, there was no way our car was going to fit there.  The pay lot ended up costing us about 15 bucks a day.  We tried the free lot on the first day, but it seemed like more than a mile, and the savings was just not worth the trouble when we wanted to come and go.  So before we let the woman go, Carol pulled out her “I’m outraged” persona and browbeat the woman until we got a discount on the place, which was just enough to counter what we ended up paying in parking.  That’s my girl!  It turns out that 90 percent of the city is not accessible by car for non-residents, but our street, and the one that leads to the pay lot are, so all was good.  In the end, there really wasn’t much of a problem.  But we could have done without all of the drama in the first place.  And we wouldn’t have had to deal with it if the woman could just learn to be a little more on top of the details.  And this story fits the emerging pattern of the rest of our Italian journey.

“But enough of that drivel,” you say.  “What about the town?  The country?  How amazing is Italy, when you have over three weeks to enjoy it?”  Well, it doesn’t stink, literally, or figuratively, I’ll tell you that much.  In fact, the little twists like the story above, are starting to paint a picture of the character of the country that is really starting to grow on me.  I’m liking the quirks.  Each new one is a little easier to stomach than the last, as we start to expect their inevitability.  And getting to laugh about it, once the problem of the day has been resolved, is getting easier, I think.  I guess I can’t speak for the rest of the family on this count, but for me, it all adds to the experience rather than subtracting from it.  Of course, I say this as I sit in bed typing, comfortable and without care.  Tomorrow, I’ll be up a Venetian canal without a paddle due to some forgotten detail, and then we’ll see how I feel about the arithmetic of the experience.

So, Lucca.  Big town for a walled city.  We rode bikes all the way around the top of the wall, and it took about an hour.  Then we rode through the town for another hour.  Granted we were stopping constantly to check out all of the nooks and crannies, but the point is, that’s a big wall!  I gave the kids a little scavenger hunt to keep them busy, so that Carol and I could enjoy the sights without having to endure the whining about being bored.  They had to find things like clocks and bells and angels and cherubs and certain colored wild flowers and at least one naked statue butt.  Nothing you wouldn’t find on a bike ride through San Rafael, right? 

The bike path and trees are actually on top of the city wall.

Sites while wandering Lucca.  The bassists were pretty good, but they were playing behind a dancer and she wasn't so good, so we didn't stay long.

Lucca was a cool place to live.  We did of lot of shopping like the locals (bread at that store, meat at another, veggies at a third, etc…) and cooking up tasty meals.  We also quickly got in the habit of getting a little something sweet, which we call our little “sumpin, sumpin” each and every day.  Usually it is gelato.  But eclairs and tiramisu and cannelloni are not out of the question either.  One can never over-estimate the promise of a treat when trying to motivate the kids to walk that one last half a kilometer to see that one last church of the day.  And when I say “the kids,” I’m including myself and Carol, as well.  Carol brings up at least once a day that she marvels that all Italians are not obese, what with all the pizza and pasta consumed, and with a gelateria at every other door on every street in the country.  We are walking many miles every day.  Often, the walks include an ungodly number of steps.  And yet, I fear the Thies clan has collectively passed the 500 pound barrier for the first time ever.  Thanks for that, Italy!

The Tuscan countryside.

Lucca was mostly just a good jumping off point for other day trips.  We did the Cinque-Terre thing one very long day.  These are five coastal hillside towns that are connected only by hour-long walking paths and a rinky-dink train system.  Each one is more scenic than the next, so if you are doing it right, you have to visit all five.  We managed to do it, but only by promising ourselves a pick-me-up at each stop.  Breakfast pastry at the first, lunch at the second, gelato at the third, a slice of pizza at the fourth, and dinner at the last town.  I don’t want to make it sound like there was no draw other than the food.  The views were amazing.  The towns were incredibly quaint and picturesque.  I had an epic day.  It was just a lot of walking and driving and train catching.  It turned out that all of the paths between towns, including the famous lovers’ path, were closed due to landslides.  We were bummed in the beginning, feeling we were missing out on views and such.  But by the end, we were thrilled not to have done any more walking than we did.  Plus, I was longing for a romantic train ride experience in Europe, right?  So we took the three minute train ride through tunnels between towns and walked our feet to death within the towns.  It was a good day.

Three of the five Cinque Terre towns from a distance.

Another day trip was to Pisa.  The cathedral was cool, but really, the only reason to go there is the Leaning Tower.  Chloe was in charge of describing that experience, so I’ll leave that up to her:

Chloe: My family and I visited the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I was really looking forward to seeing something that I knew about prior to the trip. Even though we have gone to so many amazing places, I didn’t really know about many of them before we got there. So to go to a place that I had wanted to go to and be able to cross that off my list was so exciting.

Here are some interesting facts that I learned about the Leaning Tower or Pisa. In 1173 construction was started on the tower. The plans consisted of eight stories each twenty feet high, a stairway with 295 steps, and seven bells each with a different note of the scale. About five years after they started building, they noticed that the tower had started leaning. To solve the problem they decided to start building the following stories taller on the leaning side, which in the end caused the building to resemble a banana. The tower continued to lean. To this day the top of the tower leans sixteen feet away from the base of the tower. Galileo took this as an advantage to present his theory that even if two objects are different weights, they will hit the ground at the same time if you drop them at the same time. He went to the top of the tower on the side further away from the base with two differently weighted cannon balls. Then he dropped them, and sure enough they landed at exactly the same moment.
 
My favorite part was climbing up the leaning steps. The steps wound around the tower with a wall on both sides. As we climbed the steps on the side that was leaning towards the ground, we slid against the outside wall. Then we moved toward the middle of the tower and we were able to move to the middle of the steps. Then we tilted towards the center of the tower as we progressed up the stairs. We went round and round like that till we reached the top. The parts on the steps worn down by people’s feet followed our pattern of where we were walking with the leaning of the tower. I liked how they put windows every so often so I could progressively see how far up I was. When we reached the top and looked over the balcony, the view was spectacular. We could see so many people, houses, and lots of green land. We also could see the top of the large church standing next to the tower. I am so glad that we got to go on this amazing visit to the Leaning Tower, and I cant wait to find out what we will do next.

Steve:  There you have it.  One satisfied customer.  We aim to please.

She's not trying very hard to straighten it out.  C'mon put your back into it!

A third day trip from Lucca was Florence.  Now I know, many are asking how we could possibly make Florence a day trip, as there is far too much to see in a day.  But let me remind you that we are travelling with a ten year-old boy who is about as interested in art museums as he is in Brussels sprouts.  (I can’t wait for Belgium!... No that’s not a non-sequitir, go find a map of Belgium.) My point?  We have to pace ourselves with the museums.  We tend to go into as many churches as possible, and use the frescoes and statues and architecture as our art lesson props.  So rather than actually going into the art museums, we compromised by walking around them and checking out all of the free exhibits outside the walls.  We had Josh write a book report on a story about Filippo Brunelleschi, the architect behind the first-of-its-kind giant Duomo, so that Josh would be more interested in it when we climbed up.  Here’s Josh report (Brunelleschi’s nickname was “Pippo”):

Josh:  In the book, Pippo the Fool, which is a real story, there is a young man named Filippo who is an inventor.  He made crazy inventions that nobody wanted or cared about.  When the news passed by that there was a competition to design a huge dome for the cathedral, way bigger than anything of the sort, ever, he went to work right away.  He didn’t care that a famous artist named Lorenzo said that a fool like him would never win.  He thought and thought and designed and crumpled reject ideas until finally after about a month he had his perfect design. He was ecstatic. 

The day to show it to the judges came and he got in line.  The first couple of designs by others were horrible.  One was so heavy there would be no way to support it.  The next one was the opposite.  It was made out of feathers and coins, which somehow the designer managed to get to stand up, but the first storm would blow the feathers away.  Lorenzo’s looked perfect, unfortunately for Pippo.  Except, when the judges noticed that there was so much wood necessary that they would have to chop down every tree in Italy.  So that really wouldn’t work.

Then it was Pippo’s turn.  They found it was all stone and bricks.  They asked how it would stay up but Pippo wouldn’t tell because he didn’t want anybody, especially Lorenzo, to steal his ideas.  They laughed and told “Pippo the Fool” to go home.  He didn’t give up.  He built a model with some help from a friend, and it took only a little while since he didn’t doubt himself and worked so hard.  He had so much confidence he rushed right away to tell the judges to come.  They walked around in the model and saw what he designed.  There was an inner dome supporting the outer one and chains that connected them.  The chains were not visible because they were hidden behind the inner dome.  It was ingenious.  He was so happy that his design was going to be the chosen one for the famous town cathedral, until he was told that Lorenzo would be his working partner.  But he persevered anyway.

Pippo worked with the laborers and told them what to do while Lorenzo lazed around and talked to the saleswomen.  More days passed by like this and then one day Pippo decided to rest as we was so tired from all of the hard work.  The workers looked toward Lorenzo for help and Lorenzo just shrugged and tried not to look stupid, which he did.  Lorenzo got fired on the spot.  When Pippo was back at work, he was much happier that Lorenzo was gone and he was not exhausted anymore.  It took him about sixteen years to build the dome and Pippo worked hard.  When he was all done he had so much joy he felt like jumping up and down.  He was also happy that his nickname was changed to something that suited him: “Pippo the Genius.”  

Pippo’s example can teach us many lessons in life and they are very important lessons.  As you read you found he had a lot of confidence in himself, he always worked hard, he wasn’t sensitive about other people’s insults and most important of all, he never gave up.  Sometimes, it takes more than just genius to succeed.  Take that, Lorenzo.

Steve:  The Duomo was pretty amazing.  We climbed up and took in all of Florence from one lofty perch.  We did see both life-sized replicas of Michaelagelo’s “David” up close, which seemed just as good as paying to see the original in the museum.  We also saw the famous campanile.  We spent quite a bit of time in the Leonardo Da Vinci museum playing with the interactive exhibits.  That kind of genius is more up my alley.  Art appreciation is Carol’s bowl of cherries.  And yes, we did get a little sumpin’ sumpin’ there too.

Duomo in the background (at least a mile away) 

Florence from the top of the Duomo

What's David got that I don't?  Don't answer that.  Completely rhetorical.

From Lucca, our next stop was Rome.  In the interest of financial  solvency, we only spent three nights there, giving us two full days of whirlwind sightseeing, before we went broke.  This first day was all about ancient Rome (the Colisseum, the Forum, the Palatine Hill, and the Pantheon.  We even squeezed in a visit to the Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps.  That was a full day, but even the kids were impressed, and that’s not easy to make happen.  The second day, was a guided tour through the Vatican Museum and St. Peter’s Basilica.  The Vatican was awful for all of us.  There were so many tourists that we shuffled along from room to room at a snail’s pace without even enough elbow room to breathe properly.  Yes, I breathe with my elbows.  I’m sure the art was amazing, but I couldn’t see most of it, and the feeling of being cattle led to the slaughter ruined the rest.  The tour was hard to hear, and didn’t add much to the experience in any case.  I was pretty bummed by it all.  The Basilica was a different sort of breathtaking however.  The amount of work that went into it is mind-boggling.  The master-craftmanship behind all of the details was incredible and, of course, the art is unsurpassed.  Even a hack like me could appreciate this.  Those Catholics sure know how to put on a good show.

Rome Art

Aah Josh.  Now we have to pay for it!

Guess why Carol chose this photo.  Never mind.  Don't.  Just move on.  Nothing to see here.

St. Peter's Basilica

The Pantheon

The Coliseum.  No, Josh didn't break that little chunk off. It was like that when we got here.  I swear.

Rome was impressive, no doubt.  The Greeks are the ones responsible for the birth of math and science and realism in art.  But the Romans took all of that, and made it twenty times as grandiose.  Carol keeps reminding me that the Romans are the ones who invented the arch, and that is why they could build so big.  But just because you can go big, doesn’t mean you are going to in every way.  The Romans, they knew big.

My favorite “stupid gringo” story from Rome happened immediately upon arrival.  The little old Italian lady who showed us into the apartment was having too much trouble with her English to explain to me where I could go to buy bus tickets for the next two days of sight-seeing.  So she asked me to follow her down to the parking lot so she could point the way.  Carol asked if I wanted her to come, but I said “no, I’d be right back.”  Well the little old lady then proceeded to ask me to get into my car and follow her as she drove home, because the grocery store and the shop for the bus tickets were on the way.  I balked.  “Can I go tell my wife what’s happening?”  “No,” she said, “she was in a big hurry.” It wasn’t far, she promised.  I would be right back, no problem.  Picture the little old lady insisting I follow her.  Italian grandmothers don’t take “no” for an answer.  Details.  What was I to do?  We started driving.  How long could it take?  Well, traffic was insane.  I almost lost her twice in her tiny little clunker, as crazy drivers took every opportunity (red light or no) to cut in between us.  We only went a mile, maybe.  It took twenty minutes, and involved six turns and two roundabouts which would make the return trip challenging.  Carol is going to kill me, I think.  I don’t have a phone.  I was going to be right back.  Never drive in Rome, even ten miles outside of the city center.  And, never, ever, believe a little old lady when she says “no problem.” 

She shows me the grocery store parking lot (one of those cramped garages where they park your car for you to maximize space.)  She points out the tobacco shop where bus tickets are sold.  She leaves.  I park.  I run to the tobacco shop.  Nope, no tickets left.  But the one down the street next to the McDonalds should have some.  I run, six blocks.  He’s only got the three-day passes.  Fine.  I’ll take ‘em.  I run back the six blocks to the car.  You can’t park here unless you’ve used the grocery store.  Fine.  I run to the store.  I buy breakfast for tomorrow.  I wait in the looooong check-out line.  I’ve forgotten to weigh and stamp my own bananas (if you haven’t read the Provence blogpost, you won’t understand why this is so funny).  The check-out guy takes pity on me, gets up, and goes to do the weighing himself.  I pay.  I go back down to the garage.  “Where’s your validation ticket?”  What do you mean?  You didn’t say anything about a ticket last time.  Look at my bag of groceries, it’s got the name of the store stamped across it.  “Sorry, no ticket, no car.”  I run back upstairs.  I get the ticket from the same check-out guy.  He’s chuckling and shaking his head.  I run back down.  I finally get my car.  I try to drive back the way I came, but one-way roads are making that incredibly difficult.  The traffic isn’t helping either.

When I finally arrived at the apartment, well over an hour had gone by.  Carol was in tears.  First she had imagined I was lost.  Then she imagined I was dead on the side of the road.  First she was worried.  Then she was terrified.  Now she was just plain pissed.  I had said I’d be right back.  How could I possibly have taken so long?  I was just supposed to be walking to the parking lot and back.  Well, at least I got the bus tickets, right?  Wrong.  We had agreed to get the Roma Pass, which included transportation along with the entrance fees to the sights.  Smooth move, gringo.

From Rome, we continued south to the Amalfi Coast.  This week was like a slice of Heaven on Earth.  I snapped more pictures per minute here than I have anywhere else on our trip.  Such natural beauty shouldn’t even be legal.  The rest of the world is envious.  Sparkling turquoise seas with waves crashing on chiseled cliff walls.  The towns are built against the hillsides rather than on them, as horizontal lines cannot be found anywhere on the landscape, only vertical.  I’ve included a snapshot of the Google Maps showing the switchbacks we had to drive on to get anywhere.  A one- mile distance as the seagull flies would become a five-mile trip back and forth up or down the mountain, and would take forty five minutes, easy.  The roads were so narrow that you’d have to stop more often than not to let a car go by in the other direction.  Curves were treacherous.  Crazy Italian drivers didn’t make it any easier.  But the views made up for all of that in a heartbeat.  If they built a funicular or two, I’d move here in a heartbeat.

Feeling carsick yet?

Though this is not one of those narrow roads, here's why you fold in your mirrors on them.  

We lived in a super-cute little house near Amalfi town with an ocean view to die for off the front porch.  We bought one of those picturesque 1000-piece Ravensburger puzzles to build on our kitchen table (we’d use the patio furniture to eat, don’t want to waste that view!).  The day after we finished the puzzle, on a visit to Positano, the next town over, we noticed that the view we were witnessing in person was the puzzle picture exactly.  Views so good, they make puzzles out of them!  Things like that are only supposed to happen in Yosemite.  I like it.

Our front patio and the view from over that metal fence.

The completed puzzle and the view from our walk in Positano the next day.

Carol and I had dinner at an Agriturismo, which is basically a farm where they bring tourists in to eat meals and/or stay for the night.  The many course meal was wonderful.  The setting was cool.  A stone walled room inside a hill, except on the side open to the sea, a thousand feet below.  Cozy.  The company was excellent (two other couples, one from Chicago and the other Toronto).  We compared travel notes for hours.  But the best part of the evening was the visit from the owner.  His daughters and wife had been serving us the whole evening.  He showed up at the end with a few bottles of homemade alcohol (limoncello, and a couple of variants using mandarins and fennel – awesome, all three!) Then he talked and told stories and made friendly conversation for over an hour with us.  His English was spotty at best.  But he made his points known through effusive hand gestures and body language.  He was probably sixty years old or so.  Not that this is especially old (I’ll be there soon enough) but I bring it up because, despite his age, the best way to describe his effusiveness was “cute.”  He was a cute little man with his enormous smile and his waving hands and his enormously thick accent.  He was a living caricature of the friendly old Italian grandfatherly type that you see in the movies and that you’d never expect to actually meet in real life. 

He reminded Carol of an elf.  We're holding lemons from his farm.  that is my gift bottle of  limoncello on the table.

He gave us an extra bottle of limoncello for the road, and a large portion of the quiche they had made for the next day’s breakfast.  He insisted we visit his storerooms and inspect his salami and his tomatoes and his lemons and that we take pictures with him.  It was like he was our own Italian uncle who we’d finally come back to the homeland to visit after all these years, and he was brimming with excitement to share his world with us.  Only we were just there for dinner.  Awesome.  I was going to say that I find the average Italian a bit less friendly than the Barcelonians or the French (from Provence at least) or even the Moroccans.  But after the encounter with our new Papa from Amalfi, I think he upped that average single-handedly into new unreachable heights for the rest of Europe.

There is one other episode worth recording on the Amalfi part of the trip.  The owner of the house we were living in suggested we take the famous “1000 steps” walk down to the sea as it began right at our front door.  Some famous Italian movie was set along this walk.  She said we should walk down and then catch a bus back up.  OK, who were we to question the advice of a local?  Let’s do it!

The walk down was pretty sweet.  There were more than 1000 steps to be sure, somewhere between 1300 and 1400, I think.  And these were tall steps, the kind that rattled your knees with each landing.  Walking back up was not going to be an option. That was eminently clear.  Though we did pass by a few people who were attempting it.  More power to them.  Not for me! 

We eventually got to the bottom, which was a spot where a rushing river met the Mediterranean after having spilled down the sheer cliff walls for a few miles.  There was a rocky beach, where we sat amongst the pebbles, collecting shards of ceramic work that had been discarded over the years during various path-tiling projects and had been turned smooth by time and water.  Josh spent his time skipping stones and building a dam with all the rocks he threw in the river.  A couple of hundred feet above us was an arching bridge over the river that supported the one roadway near the water that connected Amalfi with Positano.  Amalfi was apparently 5 km to our left, and Positano was about 15 km to our right as we looked out to sea.  We scaled another set of stairs up to the road and looked for a place to catch a bus.  It was still early, and we decided we’d head towards Positano to check it out, as we’d already been to Amalfi the day before. 

On the way down.

Our little fjord cove.  Turns out we should have stolen that boat... Read on.

First we had to identify a bus stop.  We hiked for maybe two kilometers along the road.  This was no easy task, as there were no sidewalks, and I already told you how narrow the roads are.  On the right side of the street was a natural cliff wall.  On the left side of the street was a manmade rock wall maybe two feet high “protecting” you from a fall down the cliffside and into the sea.  Whenever a car came flying by we had to straddle the wall or run to the other side of the road to keep from being either squashed or thrown to our doom.  Big trucks were extra scary.  So were the occasional tunnels that were cut to make the road possible.  I have to point out that I have huge respect for the engineers who built the roads in Italy and in Amalfi in particular.  There are probably a hundred times as many bridges and tunnels per km of road in this country than in California.  These roads make Highway 1 down the coast look like I-5.  We finally found what we thought was a bus stop, perched well above a tiny harbor that had a little beach and a couple of restaurants.  We waited.

Over half an hour passed by and still, no bus.  We had already seen one go by as we were walking to the bus stop, but there was no flagging it down on those crazy roads.  If it stopped somewhere that it wasn’t scheduled to stop, a twenty-car pileup would have shut the road down for the better part of the afternoon.  No, we would have to wait for the next one at the proper place.  Only we weren’t sure this spot was the proper place, and we didn’t know the schedule for the buses.  Was anything ever going to come?  Heck, we’d be happy to catch one going the other way at this point, back to Amalfi.  We’d have to go there eventually anyway, to catch something that would take us up the hill.  More time passed.  Nothing.  I even tried to hail a taxi that flew by once.  I got nothing but a wave from the driver, though.  I called our landlord and asked for the skinny.  She said something should come by soon, and that she’d call us a taxi if it came to that.  OK, we’ll wait.

Well a bus did finally show up, going towards Positano.  “Woo-hoo! We’re saved!” The kids go wild.  We piled in.  The driver asked for our tickets.  “Tickets?  I can’t just pay you?”  I was familiar with the ticket system from Rome.  But seriously?  Out here?  “Off the bus.  No ride for you.”  The bus left.  We were left standing there on the side of the road, no town in either direction for miles.  Plan B?  Plan B was to gripe about our landlord who neglected to mention the ticket thing, to gripe about the system, which was inane at best, and to scratch our heads about why we didn’t figure all of this out before we started down those darned steps; so much for spontaneity.  Plan B wasn’t very helpful, but we did feel better after implementing it.  Plan C was to call the landlord back and get that taxi.  No answer.  Great.  Let’s go back to Plan B.

Plan D was to walk the couple of hundred yards seemingly straight down to the harbor to see what the locals could offer us.  By divine providence, one of them had a boat taxi service.  He could take us to Amalfi in ten minutes for an insane amount of money.  At this point, we no longer cared.  We boarded the boat.  It was a pretty nice ride.  It was our first time ON the Mediterranean.  Within fifteen minutes we were standing in Amalfi, none the worse for wear.  We found out that bus tickets were sold in tobacco shops just as in Rome.  Really?  Oh, and by the way, you can’t buy stamps at the post office.  Those are at the tobacco shops too.  We bought a set of bus tickets.  They could keep the stamps.  We waited for another hour to catch the only bus that would take us back up the mountain.  We boarded, never being asked to produce a ticket mind you (a key detail, considering the fiasco a couple of hours earlier), and rode home (well, there was a fifteen minute walk from the closest bus stop, but that is neither here nor there… as “here” is Venice, where I’m finally getting around to writing this blog and “there” is wherever it is that you, my dear reader are doing your reading…)

That little boat on the way in to the dock was our way out.

Remind me to revisit this ticket-check thing when I write about Venice.  Craziness.

The photo op of my beautiful family was nearly ruined by the ugly view in the background at Amalfi.  OK, maybe not.

More Amalfi Town

More Amalfi Town

Stay tuned for Italia, Part II.  Pompeii, Assisi and Venice all to come.  I’ll probably throw Croatia in there for good measure.  That’s where we’re going next.  Ciao!