04/08/11
Friday marked another early start for a weekend of traveling. I was meeting my mom at Termini Train Station at 8:45 to meet her on her way back from Florence. Our train to Naples left at about 9:30. We got into Naples around 11:30 and I had been dying to go to this pizza place called Da Michele. It’s supposed to be really good and recommended in several guide books, not to mention, it’s the pizza place that Elizabeth Gilbert eats at in her book Eat, Pray, Love. So our first stop was there. It was about a ten-minute walk from the train station, but with all the luggage it felt like an hour! Gratefully, there wasn’t much of a wait to be seated so we put our luggage in the storage compartment and ordered. They only offer two types of pizza at this restaurant, marinara and margherita. I wanted to try a little of each so we ordered a little of both. In the end, I liked the margherita pizza better, although both were fantastic. The dough was definitely the best part. It was very light underneath and thick around the outside.
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| Margherita Pizza at Da Michele |
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| Marinara Pizza at Da Michele |
From lunch, we headed back to the train station where we caught the Circumvesuviana, which took us to Sorrento, the first city in the Amalfi Coast. From here, we were going to try to take a fairy alongside the coast that would take us to our final destination, Ravello. However, we were a slight bit confused as to where to catch this fairy and wound up walking all the way down a bunch of hills and stairs to the port. As it turned out, at this time of year, there was no fairy that traveled to the Amalfi/Ravello area and we had to turn around and get back to where we started from. There was no way we were hiking all the way back up hill to get to the train station so we caught a bus. While it wasn’t the most convenient trip around Sorrento, it did allow us to get a feel for the city since we weren’t going to be spending much time there.
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| View of Sorrento |
We finally got on the bus and it was about an hour and a half trip to the city of Amalfi. The time seemed to fly by though because the view from the coastline was unbelievable. While I’ve seen pictures, they definitely don’t do it justice! The whole ride consisted of hairpin turns on a road that looked as though it was a one-way street, but instead, cars drove both directions. This includes very large coach size buses. Needless to say, I thought it was pretty cool, but my mom couldn’t bear to sit on the side nearest the water out of fear. Every corner we turned I tried to take a picture, but it was often hard to do for every time I would get lined up for a shot, we would take another hairpin turn and my shot would be out of focus. There was a point in time that we got into a minor traffic jam with another bus and our bus driver had to literally get out of the bus to direct traffic. He had cars and buses backing up along the side of the road so that we could squeeze by them with less than an inch between our cars.
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| View of Positano |
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| Traffic Jam |
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| Image you see while driving along the coast when looking down from out the window! |
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| Mom's thrilled! |
When we finally got to Amalfi, we got there just in time to catch the bus up to Ravello. It was about a twenty-minute ride up the hill. This sounds like a lot of traveling in one day, but I thought it was totally worth it because using the route we took, we were able to see/drive through every city along the coast. Ravello is located further up than Amalfi so the bus took us upward towards the sky and it seemed as though the clouds followed us. I had never really thought about the fact that clouds aren’t always as high as they appear. As it turns out, many of the clouds that looked far away from Amalfi actually looked like fog from the heights of Ravello. Luckily, the clouds cleared up by the time we made it all the way up to our hotel.
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| Amalfi |
The view from our hotel was unbelievable. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a beautiful view and it remained just as pretty as the sun began to set. Not really having much of a game plan as we wanted this to be a relaxing trip, we opened up a bottle of wine before heading to dinner.
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| View from our room |
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| As the sun begins to set |
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| At sunset |
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| My mom and I before dinner! |
For dinner, we went to a little family run restaurant called Cumpa Cosima. A woman named Netta runs it and the restaurant has been in her family for nearly 65 years. We walked in and couldn’t decide on an appetizer when her son, who was our waiter that evening, suggested we order Netta’s homemade pasta with meatballs, so we did! It was delicious. For my main course, I ordered seafood pasta as I had really been looking forward to trying the seafood here given it’s located right alongside the Mediterranean Sea. The dish was even better than I’d imagined and I quickly finished it. For dessert, Netta brought out one of her famous lemon cakes that we split. At one point during the meal, her son, after having told us he runs the deli next door, came up to me and covered my eyes and said try this. He had cut some fresh salami for us. This was a very sweet gesture and it tasted great, I was just caught very off guard! After a long day, we headed back to the hotel after dinner and went to bed at a very reasonable hour!
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| Homemade pasta & meatballs |
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| Seafood Pasta from Cumpa Cosima |
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| Lemon Cake & Cappuccino |
04/09/11
When we woke up on Saturday morning, we first went to breakfast at the hotel. They didn’t serve a whole lot, but just a typical Italian breakfast. We had our options of croissants, bread with jam, and coffee. We were thrilled about the coffee, had them bring us out two pots, and finished them easily. After breakfast, we decided to lay in the sun for awhile overlooking the sea. As the day went on, the sun was coming in and out so rather than sitting around all afternoon, we went exploring. After showering, we headed out.
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| On our way to the center of Ravello |
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| Pretty view |
On our way into the town, we planned on going to lunch. However, we got stopped just before reaching the central square by two men outside of a store called Wine & Drugs who offered us a wine tasting and we obliged. We had the opportunity to try about 8-9 different wines including some dessert wines. The drugs were the dark chocolate they let us try! By the time the wine tasting wrapped up, just about all the restaurants were closed because it was after lunch, but not yet dinner time! We weren’t really sure what to do so we wandered around until we found a place that was still serving. It was located right on the main piazza.
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| Wine Tasting at Wine & Drugs |
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| Lunch on the Piazza |
I really enjoyed the town of Ravello because you could tell it wasn’t nearly as touristic as many of the other towns I’ve had the chance to travel to. As we were sitting around for lunch, we were able to watch little kids playing soccer as well as see the elderly just hang out. At one point, we saw an older man who looked very similar to my great grandpa Rhodenbaugh. When we finished lunch, we shopped around a little and I got my souvenirs. From here, we headed back up to the hotel where we relaxed and even made freshly squeezed lemonade! The Amalfi Coast is known for their lemon production and lemon trees are everywhere in this area, including directly connected to our hotel. Therefore, I walked over and grabbed a couple and my mom mixed the squeezed lemon with some sugar and I’m not sure what else and made some good tasting lemonade!
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| Off the Piazza |
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| Lemon trees outside our hotel |
After lying around for a bit, we decided we would try dinner at the hotel restaurant because it looked good, plus it had a great view. Here, I tried fusilli pasta with tomato and mozzarella. For some reason, we were super exhausted and after dinner we headed back to our room and were able to fall asleep around 9:30!
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| Me & the wonderful view! |
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| Fusilli Pasta w/Mozzarella & Tomatoes |
04/10/11
We got back to Sorrento, hopped back on the train towards Naples, where we got on the train back to Rome. Once again, the train back to Rome was jam-packed and many people didn’t have anywhere to sit. The train ride felt like a long one and my stomach wasn’t feeling that great. However, I didn’t really mind that it was taking that long because I know it was the last couple hours I would get to spend with my mom until I return to the U.S. in a month. She had decided it would be easiest to just got straight from the train station to the airport and hang out there for the night rather than go back to my apartment and have to wake up at 4 to catch a cab. When we got into Termini, I walked to show the way to the train to the airport to say goodbye.
As I turned away, I couldn’t help but to start crying given that as great of a time I am having abroad, you can’t help but be homesick. It’s easier to battle when you aren’t exposed to home, but after having my mom around for over a week, it made it that much harder to say goodbye. I couldn’t get too down though because I know I have to make the best of my last month in Rome and I’ll be home before I know it! After saying my goodbyes, I headed back home to catch up with my roommates and hear about their trip to Ireland. They showed me lots of pictures and it just made me more sure that I definitely need to make it back to Europe to go both there and London at some point in the near future.
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