John, Mary & Kathryn's Travel Page

April 21, 1997

Positano

Rome wore us out and put us badly overbudget, so we retreated to the Amalfi Coast and the town of Positano. The coast is mountain goat-steep and rocky, with plunging cliffs and tiny gray beaches. In a few spots where an acre or two of flat land clung to the coastline, the people had built small towns with a public square and a community church. As they grew, the towns climbed up the steep hillsides like ivy up a wall, sprouting clusters of houses with domed roofs and terraced patios framed with white plaster arches. Trellises laced with grape vines and a purple flower that looked like lilac shaded the patios and doorways. Winding roads carved into the slopes, or in some cases projecting out from them, connected the bakers, butchers, and little market shops of the old towns to the hotels, jewelers, and opticians installed for the tourist trade. Mazes of interlinked staircases and alleyways ran between the streets, and many a street address could be found only by squeezing down a tiny passageway, down some curving ladder-like stairs, through a hidden plaza the size of a double garage, and up a dark arched tunnel.

Our lodgings were in the Pensione Villa delle Palme in Positano, the prettiest of the towns along the Amalfi Coast. There were in fact palm trees out front, as well as various fruit bushes and the omnipresent purple-flowered trellises. The old man who owned the Villa della Palme was a musician who sat at his piano in the front room and serenaded his guests as they walked in and out. Sometimes we would arrive back to the pension in the evening to find him leading an impromptu band of piano, accordion, and spoons, or whatever instruments his friends had brought along. As the day went on we sometimes noticed that his face became redder and he smelled a whiff more like wine, but he was always up early in the mornings, watering his lemon trees and cheerfully brewing espresso for us.

From our pension to the town center was a ten-minute walk down the street and around the bend descending to the ocean. We developed some regular stops along the way, a strung-together linear community. There was the local market, just a few meters from the pension, where we bought bread, cheese and pate for lunch. The market was primarily run by a man in his thirties, who could cut a wedge of cheese, weigh a loaf of bread, and tot up three bills at once, while keeping up several simultaneous conversations with the customers crowding his counter. His father must have once been as quick and facile as his son; now he had white hair, moved slowly, and carefully handled one purchase at a time. Sometimes he forgot a price and had to put my cheese on the scale a second time. In the mornings I would see them stocking the vegetable bins together, the young man patiently explaining things to his father just as, I imagined, his father had explained them to him when he was small.

A hundred meters later there was a all-purpose bar and cafe. When we reached this point in our walks up the hill, we always felt deserving of some soft sweet gelato, hazelnut for me and chocolate for Mary. There were two telephone booths outside the bar where I would hook up my palmtop and collect our email in the evenings. After squeezing the tangle of cords and couplers back in my pocket, I could seldom resist walking the fifteen meters to the local film and postcard shop. It was distinguished from the many similar shops in town by the expensive cameras in the window. There was the latest professional Nikon, several Leicas, Contaxes, Hasselblads and Mamiyas. I found excuses to drop in every day to ogle the window display and chat about cameras. The owner would laugh when I wandered in on my latest invented errand. On the third day he brought out his working gear bag -- a foam lined hard case the size of a large suitcase -- and I had a fine time looking through a full collection of Hasselblad cameras and lenses. He was a professional photographer, but ran the shop to make ends meet. Shooting brochures for the local hotels did not pay the bills.

Then there were a few hundred meters of expensive boutiques and four star hotels, the snack stand where we would buy slices of pizza to fuel us for the return climb, the money change window, and the old church and its small plaza where local boys played soccer and neatly dressed ladies gathered in the evenings and waited for Mass. The church was in the local style, with a plain facade of dusty weathered plaster and a dome of faded gold and blue tiles. The worn exterior was a striking contrast to the immaculate interior of spotless white vaults and gilded arches, an ornate golden altar and glowing windows. The old ladies knelt as they entered, chanting "Santa Maria, full of grace". I would expose my film and leave quietly, feeling like an interloper.

Our walks always ended at the rocky beach, where children played among bright yellow fishing boats drawn up in colorful formations. Italians dressed their toddlers up like miniature adults, and the bambini looked like teepees in their quilted overcoats and shiny shoes. Kathryn crawled in the gray sand, inspecting stones and stray cigarette butts and throwing handfuls of sand on her hair, and looked much less tidy.

The view up from the beach was dominated by the rugged cliffs and bare outcroppings of rocks overlooking the town. At sunset the cliffs turned wine red as the town diappeared in shadow. Then the sky turned darker and the lights of the shops turned on and glittered like strands of Christmas lights draped on the cliffs. By dark we were usually eating dinner in the restaurant next to our hotel. After a while I began to recognize the people who stopped in for a bite or simply to chat with each other. The young man who ran the market came in with his babies and his wife, our musical hotel owner dropped by as well, and several people who we couldn't quite place regularly waved at us and yelled "Ciao" as we walked by. I would usually buy some wine to take back to our room, and if we took leftovers home the restaurant owner would stop by the hotel and pick up the silverware the next day.

Positano was only a short drive from the ruins of Pompei. I was reluctant to visit Pompei, imaging a pile of rubble swarmed by hordes of tourists, but Mary insisted and I was grateful for that because the ruins were fascinating. The streets are intact with curbs, sidewalks, and chariot routes, and much remains of the buildings, from private homes and merchants' stalls to public squares and theatres, gladiators' quarters and town market. We strolled down the main street, imagining ourselves back in the third century B.C., having a snack at the corner lunch stall, browsing the shops along the side streets, heading down to see a play at the little theater and checking the odds on the weekend's gladiator matches, waving to your friends on the way. "Hello, Flavius, how is the new chariot doing? And how do you like that new gladiator, Brutus-something-or-other? The bookies have him 3-2 against old Julius next Saturday."

We also took a trip to Capri, a short boat ride from Positano. When Mary was a little girl, she and her father used to sing a song about a young man from the enchanted Isle of Capri, and she was eager to finally see the island of her childhood song. She sang the song to me several times, unbidden, on the trip over, and we eventually left with a little wooden music box that played the Isle of Capri when you lifted the lid. I had never heard of the song or the island, and looked at Capri with perhaps less romantic eyes. There was a lovely church of pure white plaster shaped into bell-shaped domes, charming plazas lined with expensive boutiques, cats sleeping on sunny roofs, and hordes of tourists everywhere, crowding the outdoor cafes, queueing up at the fruit-draped gelato stands, and squeezing down the narrow streets elbow to elbow. At one particularly pretty bit of low stone wall overlooking a beautiful view of the ocean, travelers waited in line to snap pictures of each other. As each tourist stepped down, another one jumped up, said "formaggio", the flash went off, and the next tourist climbed up as we in the queue inched forward. We stopped in front of a local photo store decorated with snapshots of celebrities who had presumably developed their film there. I wondered how Michelle Pfieffer, Tom Cruise, and Jim Belushi could possibly have strolled around the sights of Capri without being hounded by crowds of Italian teenagers.

We had our own sort-of-celebrity with us. People were always stopping to say hello to Kathryn or bring their own children over to play, which usually meant the children stared uncertainly at each other as the adults oohed and aahed. Sometimes people even had their picture taken with her. Sometimes it seemed that the social benefits of traveling with a cute baby might even outweigh the collection of smelly diapers back in the hotel room.

Traveling On a Budget

Positano was full of reasonable pensions for L80,000 a night, or less, and this early in the season they were all empty. The budget hotels on Capri were all full.

Staying Connected

In Tuscany our laptop's hard drive began suffering an increasing number of bad clusters, which we were advised was a sign of a crashing hard drive, and reason to stop using the laptop until repairs could be made. We learned that people who carry laptops abroad should consider buying major brands like IBM and Compaq, which can be serviced almost anywhere in the world. We didn't have one, and spent some time waiting for a new hard drive to be sent to my father in the US who mailed it to my aunt in Switzerland where it would hopefully be awaiting our arrival. Updates to these pages were put on hiatus and we limped along with only occasional emails via the palmtop.

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