Nicole schreibt...

Amalfi Coast 2007

Following my last rather disappointing trip to Italy two years ago, I had been sure to not return there for a while. But then I was in need of a few quiet and sunny days before the summer ended (the "summer" that was a joke here in Germany) and decided to take a look at the one part of Italy everyone gushed about and which I hadn't seen yet: The Amalfi Coast, south of Naples. When I had booked my flights I wasn't aware that the 15th of August is a public holiday (Ferragosto) in Italy - something that would soon come to haunt me. The flight arrived on time and I could easily catch a bus to Naples Central Station where I met up with my friend and newest travel mate Janina who had already travelled around Italy on her own and had now come from Rome to meet me. We caught the train to Salerno, where we were supposed to take a bus to Amalfi. It was 14h15 then and the bus was supposed to come at 14h30, but no luck. Not with the 15h00 bus either. Apparently both of these did not run on holidays. At 15h30a bus finally arrived, but the driver refused to take us aboard without tickets which he wasn't selling. And the only ticket office was - you guess it - closed for the holiday. We agreed to share a taxi with an Australian couple just as stuck as us, but the taxi drivers had already picked up on our predicament and demanded 120 Euro for the 20 kilometer-drive.

Luckily we found a rather helpful Italian couple who took us along to the port where we could take a boat to Amalfi. So I finally reached the hotel five and a half hour after my plane had landed at Naples airport. Go figure. We didn't do much anymore that evening except stroll around the picturesque main street of Amalfi and the beach promenade and had dinner in the church square. The next day was wholly dedicated to chilling on the beach... as much as it is possible to chill on a crowded Italian beach. But at least it was possible here to only rent a sunchair and umbrella for 10 Euro and not be forced to pay entry to the rip-off stabilimenti like in Viareggio which had annoyed me so much that I departed Italy three days earlier than scheduled.

When the Amalfi Coast gets mentioned, the place everyone gushes about is Positano, so curiosity made us take a bus there in the late afternoon for a stroll downhill through the narrow steep streets towards the harbour where we had a great meal with home-made pasta and wine. Positano may be a swanky playground for the rich mostly, but it is certainly one of these rare places that deserve their good reputation.

Having always had a keen interest in Ancient Rome, the one place for me to see in this area was Pompeii, the Roman town that got completely buried under lava and ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD and is today one of the best preserved sites with many buildings still standing completely including wall paintings, fountains and the eerie plaster casts of Pompeiians who couldn't escape the disaster. While it was all amazing to see and really brought Ancient Rome back to life with many vivid details, I could never quite shake off the thought of the tragic end of this town and its inhabitants. And make sure you get there early in the morning for after 11am it started to get so crowded with tourists that it became almost impossible to be alone in one of the gorgeously preserved villas and pretend to be back in time.

The plan for the last full day had been to go to the famous jetset island of Capri and visit the Blue Grotto, but with the ferry boat alone costing 28 EUR for the return trip,never mind the excursion into the grotto and a potential meal, we decided to pass on this. Instead we went on a morning walk along the Amalfitana, the beautiful winding coastal road to the Green Grotto, which only cost 5 EUR and offered similar reflexions in the water of the underground cavern. Returning to Amalfi, we spent some more hours on the beach for some sun and swimming and set off for another walk in the evening, this time uphill to the much praised mountain village of Ravello where countless writers, poets and composers have supposedly found inspiration, including our own Richard Wagner who wrote a part of his Parsifal after being in Ravello. It was a very pretty little village indeed with great outlooks all over the coast and even the bus back down to Amalfi was on time!

But I was back in arms over the chaotic SITA bus company next morning when we departed Amalfi to head back to Naples. The bus to Salerno was due to leave at 9am, but at 8.50 none of the buses waiting at the stop sported a sign for Salerno. Asking one of the SITA guys, we were told that "the bus to Salerno is still to come&. And at 9am suddenly a totally empty bus pulled out from behind a clump of waiting buses... and merrily hit the road towards Salerno. I was so gobsmacked I couldn't even think of curses. We took another bus to Sorrento then and changed into the rattling slow Circumvesuviana local train which had already taken us to Pompeii (and which we had then resolved to avoid). So again it had taken us four hours to get from Amalfi to Naples. Dumping our baggage at the central station we set out to explore the town with the worst reputation in the whole of Italy. A reputation that, in my opinion, is completely unjustified.

Sure, it was Sunday and so probably much calmer than it would normally be, but I found Naples a perfectly charming town with a picturesque old town to stroll around narrow lanes in and the representative buildings of the once Kingdom of Naples and Sicily and the amazing Galleria Umberto shopping passage. Naples also prides itself on having invented the original pizza and so we had a classic Pizza Margherita for dinner before it was time for me to depart for the airport and back home to Cologne, while Janina stayed another day to fly home to Munich the next morning. Have I made my peace with Italy now? I will always love Venice and I do want to go back to Rome some day, but on the whole I can't say I like that particular mixture of completely ripping off tourists while being rude and unhelpful to them at the same time. I've found a lot more hospitality and fairer prices in other Mediterranean countries like Spain and Greece and those still offer a lot for me to discover too!