Amalfi Coast

The Amalfi Coast is a tourist mecca, in season the resort towns are mobbed with visitors and the seas are full of yachts and whatnot.  Before the construction of the coastal road, the people travelled on ancient footpaths through the hills above.  This is lemon and orange country, the lemons are different here and especially large, there are lots of trees bearing fruit right now.

First we had to get to the Amalfi coast, and that requires the use of the SITA buses.  I printed out bus schedules ahead of time to bring, then we had to go to a tobacconist shop to get tickets.  The tickets are priced according to time, the tobacconist knows which time ticket to sell you when you tell him where you are going.  We waited at the nearby stop then got on and validated our tickets in the machine, similar to the train system.  If you do not validate your ticket, and get checked, you will get a huge fine.

The coastal road is not for the faint of heart, I would not be interested in driving it.  It is incredibly twisty, narrow and has hairpin turns with mirrors set up so the drivers can see if something is coming.  The bus drivers are amazing and wheel full-size buses around like it is nothing, heavy on the gas and heavy on the brakes.  In the summer when it is boiling hot and the buses are standing room only, many tourists succumb and throw-up, seriously.  John saw one on the way back to Salerno chuck his cookies after he dashed off the bus.  The only visitors around seem to be Italians, it is obvious that they can read the signs.

We took the bus to Amalfi, the resort town, and then walked through narrow passageways between apartment type housing and up steps and around corners and up, down, left, right and it was a good thing the hiking guide book gave explicit directions.  This took us to Atrani, then we headed up hill, the steps were relentless, there must have been a billion of them.  We were getting bagged out but kept on climbing (the hike is a 1180 foot gain).

Finally we reached our destination, the hill town of Revello and the Villa Cimbrone.  An Englishman bought the estate lands in 1904 and created an English garden.  It would be beautiful in the summer when everything is in bloom, right now there are a few roses blooming, and the gardeners were busy get things in order for spring.  There are wonderful views from Villa Cimbrone, the top of the hill.

After visiting Villa Cimbrone, we walked down to the main piazza and had our lunch on a bench.  Then we proceeded down the steps back to Atrani.  The aged Italian men are just like the aged Scots, very friendly.  When meeting aged Italians, every member of the group will greet us with buonasera, which is good evening basically.  There is a certain time of day when buongiorno changes to buonasera, but I don’t know what time that is exactly.

The walk down the billion steps was fairly brutal on our legs.  We had to catch the 5:05 bus in Atrani or would have had to wait another hour, thus we were speeding down all those stairs.  We got there at 4:30, so we hung around the bus stop for a little while.  The bus may come before or after the scheduled time, if early, the bus does not wait around, it takes off.  Ours arrived at 5:02.

On the ride back to Salerno it was dark, we got off the bus somewhere near the sea and headed into the centro storico or historical centre.  The streets were jammed with people, it was difficult to make progress.  We loaded up on groceries because all the shops are closed on Sunday.  There are rules involved when shopping in Italy, we knew about all of this from our research.  In the produce shop, the customers do not touch the food, you tell the shopkeeper what you want, then the shopkeeper selects the vegetable for you.

Italy is fabulous for meat-eaters, as there are butcher shops all over the place.  The butchers are all dressed in white and tend to be older men.  They wrap up your cheese, salami and meat in a couple layers of really great butcher-type paper, not like the stuff we have at home.  Shopping for food is a bit more time consuming as we have to visit several places and we have yet to find cream for our tea.

Click on pics to enlarge

Amalfi Duomo

Passageway to Atrani

Atrani

Never ending stairs

The Destination

Views from the Top

The Terrace of Infinity

Avenue Of Immensity

View from our lunch spot

Stairs going back down