We visit the Isle of Capri

Four years ago when we visited Sorrento with Concetta’s sisters, Phyl and Paula, Concetta and I visited the Isle of Capri, which is just a short ride by jet boat from here. That particular visit, we had a simply marvelous time hiking to the village of Capri that lies several hundred feet higher in elevation than the harbor. Though most tourists opt for the tour busses or taxis that line the quay waiting for customers, we chose instead to walk and take photographs of the beautiful gardens that seem to be everywhere.

This year we weren’t quite so lucky. We hadn’t been on the jet boat more than a few minutes when a tour pitchman descended on us and talked us into spending twenty Euros apiece to get the “special treatment” that only he could provide. I was initially going to send him on his way, but the couple with whom we had been sitting proclaimed that they were going to do it and why not give it a try. The only thing that interested me was that he promised to take us higher on the mountain to visit Anacapri, another, smaller village that we had missed on our first visit.

As you might guess, good ol’ Luigi sang to us, told us wonderful stories, and generally entertained us as we boarded his tiny bus and made our way up the most diminutive piece of highway you’ve ever seen. This ribbon of blacktop promised to allow two buses to pass safely while clinging to the cliff-face hundreds of feet above of the bay, but I don’t think I was the only passenger holding my breath at such encounters. After we arrived at Anacapri, ol’ Luigi shamelessly spent the morning herding us from one relative’s shop to another’s just to let us “take a look.” Midday, we found ourselves in his cousin’s restaurant for lunch where we had a small plate of pasta, a glass of wine probably imported from China, and a frozen dessert of some indefinable sort.

It was about this time that Concetta and I split from Luigi’s company and spent the rest of the afternoon exploring on our own, which is what we should have done in the beginning. Unfortunately, by then the sun had drifted behind a bank of clouds making photography impossible, so we did a little window shopping, some hiking around the tiny lanes that descend into the canyons, and then we rode the funicular railway back to the harbor and caught the ferry back to Sorrento. As days in Italy go, it was not one of our best. But hey, we’re getting ready to venture out into the tiny lanes that wend their way from our Sorrento Hotel down the mountain towards the sea. We’ve had some very fine dinners while wandering down there, and I have high hopes for a repeat performance.

Dashing north for Sorento

Friday morning dawned clear and beautiful from our patio at the Angela Hotel on the Island of Sicily overlooking the cloud-shrouded Mount Etna volcano. We headed down to breakfast as usual, but we sensed since the hotel staff had not contacted us about our stay having been extended due to some last-minute cancellation from another guest that we would have to leave our new-found haven. Concetta and I thoroughly enjoyed our breakfast on the terrace overlooking the volcano nonetheless. Around ten, we loaded up the car and headed down the mountain. We were lucky once again as the hotel van was headed for it's morning drop-off and was going just the way we wanted to go. Thanks to the van, we had no trouble finding our way to the main highway for our trip back to Messina and the ferry.

We had plugged in the GPS to guide us but for some reason we kept choosing the wrong routes and making the little machine irritable. Finally, we turned it off and used our wits to find the ferry. With the Davis luck running high, we found the ferry entrance, presented our ticket, and boarded just as the doors were ready to close. We were, in fact, the last two or three cars allowed on board.

When we first boarded the ferry for Sicily we sort of cowered in the car unwilling to get out and leave our luggage to the unknown. This time, we locked the car, and found the upper decks so we could enjoy the voyage. It was great. Then, when we unloaded, we easily found our way out of the embarkation area and down the road to our next destination, Reggio Calabria. There, Concetta wanted a chance to see the 6th century bronze Greek statues at the local museum. We thought we had found at leaset the general location and, after finding a killer parking spot, we set off on foot to the museum. We stopped several local residents to ask the location, but finding no one who spoke English, we were not successful in walking to the museum. However, as a last try, we stopped a man in an orange shirt and asked him about the museum's location. Thankfully, he knew exactly what we wanted and pointed us in the correct location. Retrieving the car, we drove there and spent a wonderful hour viewing the exhibits.

After our museum visit, we talked about just where we should go at that late hour -- around 2:30 p.m. -- that would allow us to find a hotel. Even though it seemed like a long shot, we decided we'd make the dash for Sorento and, however late we arrived, we'd book a stay for three days and do some exploring around Napoli. At times, I certainly regretted our decision, as the sun sank lower and my lunch of one banana and half a scone began to play on my mind. Finally, after battling traffic through a dozen construction sites and the Friday-night madness of the Sorento coast, we arrived at our destination, the Villa Maria Hotel in Sorento, the hotel where we stayed four years ago. It was nice to be back on familiar ground.

Thankfully, we arrived in time at our Sorento hotel to find dinner still in progress and a room ready and waiting for us. It's always hard to "wing it" in a place as popular as Sorento and I had little confidence that we'd find a vacancy. But luck was with us once again and we now have a cozy room on the third floor. Concetta and I drank a whole bottle of Italian red between us for dinner so this blog may have an error or two that I've missed. But, for now, all is right with the world. We've traveled several hundred miles today from the foot of the Mount Etna volcano to the foot of the Mount Vesuvius Volcano. Things can only get more interesting from here. Until then, I bid you Buona Notte! Ciao.

Tramping around Taormina

This morning Concetta and I decided to spend our day in old Taormina strolling the narrow lanes and alleys, visiting the shops, and – what else? – scoping out the best place to find a bit of pasta for lunch. Our Hotel, the Angela, offers breakfast at 8:00 a.m. on the terrace so we didn’t have to jump out of bed until well after after 7:00 a.m. After a light meal of granola, yogurt, scones, and fruit – and, naturally, several cups of black coffee, we headed for the hotel van which was headed downtown at “half nine,” as the desk clerk put it. My intention was to get some photos before the sun gained its straight overhead zenith in order to get those bluer skies and longer shadows to accentuate all the wonderful old stone buildings and colorful shop fronts.

In one way, we felt a little bad for not seeking out some tour or other that was headed for an archaeological site or ancient Greek ruin or something, but the truth is we’ve grown a little tired of those things and decided that we’d just wander the town and take photos and look for food. It turned out to be one of the nicest days we’ve had on this adventure. We had no time limits and no destinations. We looked at ceramics and local wines and baby clothes. We had time to wait until the proper “models,” like girls in long summer dresses, wandered into my photos. We even had time to wait until everyone wandered out of the photo. I always look for “models” who have on bright oranges and reds and blues, but usually have to count on Americans to fill that bill. For some reason, Europeans tend to like black, a color that doesn’t do a thing for landscape photos.

The best thing we visited this morning was an open-air Roman theater that dates back a couple of thousand years (probably built on the foundations of an earlier Greek theater) and has by far the best setting of any of the ancient theaters that we’ve visited. The seats are cut into a hillside hundreds of feet above the Mediterranean and the theater audience would have as a backdrop to the actors the wide sweep of that awesome blue sea far, far below. The grandeur of it takes your breath away.






The second best thing we stumbled over today turned out to be the parco publico (municipal park) that clings to the edge of the cliff overlooking the sea perhaps six or seven hundred feet below. The park has been designed with long tree-shaded walks, bright flower gardens, and dozens of nooks and crannies where you could find a comfortable bench and enjoy a quiet conversation. In a city full of buzzing motor scooters and tiny Fiats dashing to and fro, the park came as welcome a surprise as a desert oasis.

After a lovely hour in the sanctuary of the park, our tummies told us it was time for that bit of pasta. Minutes later we had retraced our steps into the heart of the old city and had chosen Il Baccanale for our lunch. I settled on the lasagna. Concetta passed on the pasta and chose an omelet just for a bit of change. For dessert, along with our espresso, we decided to share a lemon ice just because it sounded so cool. Our restaurant hosts, for reasons unknown, treated us to a glass each of almond liqueur, which I promptly added to my espresso for some extra kick. As we had done all day, we took our time with lunch and didn’t resume our wandering until after 2:00 p.m.

Concetta was anxious to spend some time on our terrace with her book so around 3:00 p.m. we made our way back to Hotel van’s pickup spot and we were back in our room by 3:30 p.m. There, we checked our email, got our showers, and spent the balance of the early evening taking it easy – or rather, Concetta took it easy. I’m here typing the blog. LOL.

Around 7:30 p.m., we plan to walk up the road to a dinner spot we’ve heard about and see if we can finish off the evening with some more great Italian food. I’ll let you know how that turns out. Until then, I bid you buona notte. Ciao.

Ci Vadiamo in Sicilia

For the last five days we’ve been enjoying a wonderful visit with Concetta’s cousin, John, and his delightful wife, Helen, at their vacation town home in Cenadi, Italy. To give you a bit of insight into what Cenadi is like, visualize miles and miles of low rolling hills with virtually every inch covered in vegetation of some sort. Olive groves march off in orderly rows in just about any direction you look. Fig trees grow everywhere, both in gardens and along the edges of farm fields. Around every bend in the road you see a wonderful profusion of grape vineyards and gardens nestled in beside “rusticos,” or ancient rock houses. And wherever you don’t see carefully tended gardens and orchards, you see wonderful stands of chestnut trees, wispy fern-covered fields (where the wild mushrooms hide), and dozens of other species of trees I couldn’t begin to identify. Amongst all this beauty you find, just here and there, tiny villages full of wonderful old stone and stucco houses with red-tile roofs, bright colored entryways, and even brighter-colored laundry hanging from ancient iron balconies. Below those balconies, wind skinny two-lane roads, so narrow that you have no choice but to slow the pace of your life down and take in some of this rustic beauty, even if it’s for just a moment.

We love to come to Cenadi for the people as well. On either side of John and Helen’s house are good friends named, of all things, Montesano. As some of you know, Concetta’s last name is Montisano. The spelling was changed from the original Montesano spelling when the family immigrated from Centrache, a town just down the hill from Cenadi nearly a century ago. Though the neighbors are probably not relatives (Montesano being the third most common name in the area), we have come to love those folks like they were our own relatives. Frank and Isa on the north side are the family who are offering to sell us an apartment in their building if we would like to have a base in Cenadi from which to explore Italy more thoroughly in the future. Yesterday we had a marvelous lunch with Frank and Isa comprised of such a quantity and variety of wonderful food that I didn’t want dinner five hours later. From Isa’s pasta, fried peppers, wild chicory, lightly battered mushrooms, and to-die-for salads, to Frank’s homemade wine, we feasted like Kings and Queens for at least two hours. For dessert they brought out a plate of home-grown figs and other fruits that was a beauty to behold. That, along with ice wine and a triple dose of espresso made me want to sign the purchase agreement right there and then.

And then there’s the Montesanos on the south side, Tony and Maria. Lovely folks they are and there’s no mistake. The Montesanos “south” always have us to lunch or dinner when we come to visit, and this time was no exception. On Monday the four of us (Me, John, Helen, and Concetta, met at Tony and Maria’s for a whirlwind feast of everything from pasta to roast chicken with rosemary potatotes, stuffed eggplant to garden-grown salad. Of course Tony had his own homemade wine as well. In fact, just last night I was privileged to photograph Tony and his nephew, Giovani, carrying crate after crate of freshly-picked grapes to dump into the hopper where the stems would be stripped off. Tony is 70 years old, but he could work circles around me. After putting his thirty or forty crates of grapes through the stem-stripper, he went to his nephew’s house to do the same job. After that, it was a friend’s turn. He told me he didn’t finish stripping grapes until 10:30 p.m. What a guy. Before we left, I had a chance to get to know Maria better by sitting with her on her patio for an hour and stripping the dried beans out of the center of a whole bunch of string bean hulls for use in next year’s planting. As a reward, Maria gave me a whole package of beans to plant in my garden.

Of course, it was very hard to say goodbye to John and Helen, but since they’re getting ready to fly home to Canada, we had to bid them a very fond farewell and bon voyage. They made us very, very welcome over the past few days, even taking us sight seeing and shopping and letting us use up a bunch of their satellite Internet time. Breakfast was our favorite time of the day as we sat and planned the day’s events. I’m sorry I forgot this morning to sample the fig yoghurt (they get loads and loads of better flavors here), but the coconut was terrific. John and Helen are lovely hosts, and we hope to visit them again some time soon.

Around 9:30 a.m. we had the car all loaded and Concetta and I headed off down the mountain into some dazzling blue skies and toward the sparkling blue of the Mediterranean. We hit just a tad of fog as we gained altitude at one point, but most of the drive was heavenly. We didn’t have to rush since our goal was the east coast of Sicily, and we decided that we could easily do that in half a day. The journey here to Sicily turned out to be a tad more complicated than we thought, but by 3:30 p.m. we had reached our destination village of Taormina, just down the road from Messina where the ferry boat deposited us. We were expecting close to pandemonium in our ferry experience, but in truth, it wasn’t that bad. The Italians are sometimes a bit stingy with their road signs, which can make for some tense moments, but for the most part we purchased our ticket, got in the proper line, loaded up when the ferry docked, and got off without so much as a single problem. We had been warned that all hell can break loose when you’re trying to exit the ferry because they try to funnel four or five lanes of traffic off the ferry to one lane exiting the disembarkation point. In our case, we boarded fairly early in the process, got placed right behind an ambulance with the blue lights vigorously flashing, and when it exited so did we. In fact, we were the number one car down the exit lane. Some piece of luck!

So, our next bit of uncertainty resulted from my insistence on not making any reservations on Sicily. I wanted our choice of lodging to be based solely on accident if possible. Though that sounds a bit daft, I like at least occasionally to let serendipity take control to see just what adventures can result. Before we left this morning, and quite at the last minute, John gave me some Internet searches that Helen had performed some time ago when she wanted to go to Sicily. From that stack of searches, Concetta and I picked out a likely target for our night’s lodging based on whether they had Internet or not. As fate would have it, we found the Hotel Angela without much difficulty, drove up and parked right in front, and discovered that they indeed had space for us. We would have liked three days, but they could only guarantee two at this point. I’m hoping that someone ends up cancelling, but if not, we’ll head off down the road to see just what other adventures we can turn up. At the moment our room is located high up on a cliff face overlooking both the Mediterranean and the slopes of the active volcano, Mount Etna. It almost seems that we have a view that goes on for several lifetimes. I’m not sure what our plans for the evening are going to be, but the hotel runs a shuttle down the mountain to the old part of Taormina where there are a vast selection of restaurants and shops. So, pardon me while I finish getting dressed. I’m starting to get hungry and I haven’t eaten anything but a banana since breakfast. I’m starting to fall away to a shadow.

The photo above was taken from our bedroom patio after we returned from dinner. Quite by accident, I think Concetta and I stumbled onto the very best restaurant in Taromina. We got the full white table cloth treatment followed by the best ravioli I've had in years and years. The wine was superb, the service excellent, and the view was much like what you see above. We stayed the full course from anti pasti to gelato and coffee. I could eat there forever. When we were done, the hotel called for us with a van. What a place!

Tomorrow we'll probably explore a bit around here and then, who knows? Stay tuned.

Adventures in Pizzo

Yeah! The rain finally cleared up for ten or twelve minutes – long enough for us to dash to he car and head down the mountain to drier climes. Thankfully, the rain clouds didn’t follow us and we emerged in the town of Pizzo by the sea under blue skies (mostly). The beauty of the drive down the mountain through fern-festooned glades and arboreal tunnels of huge overarching trees put everyone in high spirits. The Calabrian mountains with their verdant, rolling forests and meadows and sweeping views of the sparkling Mediterranean, makes you want to buy a piece of ground, build a cabin, and raise figs and grapes for the rest of your life.

The first seaside place we visited was La Piesa de Piedigrotta. Here, seventeenth century shipwrecked sailors tunneled into the sandstone cliff face and fashioned a church complete with carved statues of saints and other religious figures. I didn’t try to count them, but there looked to be a least a hundred carved sandstone figures in sizes varying from a few inches tall to life-sized in a room on par with any small Italian village church. Outside, the storm-tossed waves of the Mediterranean crashed against the rocks, but inside, in the dark serenity of the church, you could easily imagine those poor shipwrecked souls working feverishly to influence the God who had seemingly abandoned them.

Leaving La Piesa de Piedigrotta, we found a parking place in Pizzo and picked our way along the highway full of speeding Fiats to find the stairs to the cliff-side piazza several stories above us. The highway had no sidewalk, so we had to plaster ourselves next to the guardrail and hope we would be able to jump out of the way should an oncoming “macchina” get too close. Thankfully, we made it without incident and had soon gained the sunny heights above where a double row of side-by-side restaurants and an ocean of yellow, blue, and white plastic chairs greeted us. Each restaurant came complete with it’s own “pitchman” who stood at the edge of his particular eatery and beckoned you to come sit down. “Sorry,” we told them, “we’re just enjoying our passagiata,” our stroll on such a beautiful Calabrian day.

Our game plan was to finally choose a restaurant and have a bit of pasta and wine, then explore the tiny streets and alleys of Pizzo for an hour or so, then find another restaurant for our ice cream and espresso break. Our secret agenda that caused us to seek out Pizzo in the first place was to taste their famous Tartufo, a chocolate ice cream concoction that simulates in size and shape and color the Tartufo mushrooms (truffles). We weren’t disappointed. The Tartufos were absolutely to die for. I didn’t order one, but John and Concetta did and I got to taste hers. It was wonderful and light and as solidly chocolate as you could want.

That evening, after we had arrived back in Cenadi, we were invited to Tony Montesono’s next door for Italian torta and homemade wines and liquores. My absolute favorite is Tony’s Nocello, a dark sweet liquid made from the green outer husks of walnut shells. Tony says that in order to get the most perfect Nocello, you have to harvest the walnuts on June the 23rd exclusively. No other day, according to Tony, will produce as fine a taste. He makes only a few bottles each year and, sadly, his small supply is already promised for this year. I told him to please, please reserve a bottle for me for next year and he could name his price.

This morning we're off mushroom hunting in the forest so I have to close and get my boots on. 'Till next time, I bid you ciao, Tutti.