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3 - Martedì

Sunshine! It was a glorious morning and I took a load of photos of the Bacco before setting off once again towards Amalfi. All the usual frustrations as fabulous views are passed by with no chance of stopping, but then I arrived at Amalfi itself and found absolute chaos!

The centre is vehicle-free and the police wave you on and on until you find yourself leaving the town and heading off along the coast. Pausing only to locate the famous Carloggio’s restaurant, (one day maybe), I carried on along the cliff road until I eventually found a parking meter in Minori. (All very confusing – with typical Italian efficiency, the parking meter hadn’t been put back an hour at the weekend, so I paid for two hours parking and the ticket claimed I had had one of them already! With any luck, it will be at least a week before anyone comes to check!) Minori was very pleasant, and gave a chance for a calm hour nursing a mineral water in the sunshine on the sea-front before heading back to the car and discovering I’d parked right beside a recently-excavated roman villa with museum, so I spent a while perusing amphorae before setting off for round two in Amalfi.

This time I found a parking space (nearly a mile from the centre and 3 € an hour!) Good job I had some change on me. I forked out 9 € in coins and set off towards the centre.

I love Amalfi, it’s a gorgeous, buzzy, tourist trap of a town; wonderfully Italian and obviously very old; narrow streets, steps and dark passageways everywhere and plenty of noise and bustle. I am writing this at a restaurant table right beside the steps of the cathedral, watching the world go by while I digest a pizza caprisciosa.

This is as good as it gets!

When the parking meter ran out, I headed slowly back towards Furore, but on an impulse, took a side-road to Ravello. I knew they produced wine and that it was inland a bit, but had no real idea what it would be like. The road up into the hills was narrower and more tortuous even than usual and at one point they had installed traffic lights and a one-way system over a couple of miles of hair-pins because the road was so narrow it was impossible for cars to pass.

Ravello was worth it however. Centred around a religious community (apparently founded by St Francis of Assisi) and with hillsides full of terraced vineyards, the town centre has great character and lots of fascinating shops. I found a copy of a booklet showing photographs of Pompeii with clear plastic overlays to show what they would have looked like in AD 79. I had coveted just this book the last time I visited this area as a teenager (when was that?) and had often regretted not buying a copy, so it was a great pleasure to find one and finally own it.

I sat in a café on the square and flicked through it while listening to Neapolitan favourites on my MP3 player and realised how autumnal the air felt. I was actually feeling quite chilly as I left and not for the first time, I wished I had brought some warmer clothing with me.

On the way back to Furore the heavens opened and I ran into the hotel from the car park getting fairly soaked in the process and ran upstairs to rescue my only jumper from the balcony, where I had left it to dry in the sun that morning after a semi-successful attempt to wash out the spaghetti stains from last night (sporca chonia!) Of course, it was soaked by the time I got to it, so I went down to dinner just a little colder that I would have liked on a Mediterranean holiday!