Italy 2011

Ice cream seems to play a big part in Italian life. After school we see the school kids getting gelato. In the afternoon and during the passagiata, the evening walk, you see lots of people with ice cream cones. And these are not tourists, as we said there seem to be few tourists in Lecce, the Italians just like ice cream it seems.

The ice cream is very good. Lots of interesting flavors. Just about every corner has a gelato shop. And it seems that each town has one place that is considered the best in town. In Sorrento that was Davide, here in Lecce it is Naturale.

One wonders how the Italians stay so thin. One thing is that it is mostly the younger people that are thin. And we all know how much easier it is to be thin when you are younger. The older people seem to fill out a bit, maybe it is all that ice cream.

We are, of course, tourists by definition. There is the old joke about tourists wanting to go to places that are “unspoiled” so they can spoil them themselves. We started in Sorrento which is very touristy. It was fairly light when we were there because this is the very beginning of the season. Things just start to get going in April. It was easy to find places to stay, restaurants were fairly empty and anxious for our business.

Still the place seemed touristy. People already seemed tired of answering the same questions over and over, people were a bit abrupt. Wynette lived in Santa Fe and lots of the locals there didn’t like the tourists. It seems a natural reaction when you are inundated with them.

We stayed in Sorrento for six days and decided we wanted to stay someplace less touristy. We had already chosen Lecce, before we started the trip, for that reason. Puglia is a long strip on the southeast coast of Italy, on the Adriatic. The lower part of the “heel” of the boot that is Italy, kicking Sicily. Lecce and the rest of the boot comprise the Salerno area.

Lecce is definitely less touristy. It seems like just about everyone is local. We see a few tourists in the restaurants and at the B&B but not around the city. It has given Wynette a good chance to practice her Italian since only a few people speak English and often only a bit.

On the other hand we are in the Centro Storico, that is, the old part of the city. It seems that most Italian cities have an old historical district that is preserved and strictly controlled, and around it grows a much larger new city where the bulk of the people live. Lecce does not seem touristy but the Centro Storico is mostly shops, hotels, restaurants, B&Bs, etc. People live here to service the visitors, even if the visitors may be from the newer parts of the city.

Capri is very popular. It was fairly light when we were there since it was a Monday in April. When Logan and I were there it was unbelievably crowded. But, as soon as you get away from the main areas you don’t see as many people. We took a walk from Capri town along an undeveloped area and didn’t see anyone for the hour or more that we walked.

The walk starts out from the Armani Store in Capri town (well, not literally but it is close by) and goes by houses:

It changes to a paved trail along the cliffs and soon gets to the famous Faraglione rocks. If you have ever seen a picture of Capri it is probably of these rocks.

We saw three Italian naval ships doing practice maneuvers and caught one of them as it went between the rocks.

We continued the walk along the cliffs, just beautiful with lots of amazing views. At the end we found out why we didn’t see many people, we had to go up hundreds of steps at the end to get back to the road. Here is Wynette about 75% of the way up.

And here she is almost to the top.

An amazing walk and well worth the steps. It took another 30 minutes walking on the path past people’s back yards, all fairly flat, to get back to the hotel.

I forgot to mention the owner of the beautiful villa was Axel Munthe. it was built around 1900. He loved animals. they had pictures of his dogs but here is the statue:

Our hotel room has a safe behind a picture, just like in the movies.

We took a day trip to Capri yesterday. The jet boat takes 20 minutes to get there, Capri is quite close to the mainland. There are steep cliffs all around the island with only two places where you can land a boat. The Roman emperor Tiberius moved the capitol here and governed the Roman empire from Capri for 20 years. Being on an easy-to-control island helped in thwarting assassins, which he was worried about.

Here we are on the boat going over:

You land at the Marina Grande:

We took the funicular up to Capri town, very trendy. We had some coffee and took the bus to Anacapri, the other town on the island. The bus goes through the mountains on two-land cliff-on-one-side roads that would be considered one-lane roads in the US.

We had lunch at a recommended place and it was the best meal we have had so far. The restaurant was a little courtyard with kitchy statues:

We saw a nice church with a beautiful floor.

Wynette liked this tree by the main square. This kind of tree is quite common in this area.

We visited a villa built by a Swedish doctor, very pretty:

and nice furniture:

and a beautiful garden:

with amazing views:

in several directions:

and lots of flowers:

and rows of trees:

and a sphinx, sfinge in italian, which gives good luck if you rub, which we did, and which now we have:

We walked by the hotel Logan and I stayed at a few years ago when we were here.

Next we went for a very nice walk along the ocean but I’ll leave that for the next post since you are probably getting tired, and we were tired at the end of the walk. I’ll put in one spoiler: there were a LOT of stairs.

Post by Wynette, Day 5 in Sorrento: Ilaria has been at the front desk of our B&B nearly every time we’ve gone through. We are fortunate to be near the center of town so we can come and go to our B&B several times a day to rest, get things, etc. So we have seen Ilaria several times a day, every day. We are wondering when she takes a break. She said “Ilaria”, pronounced ee-lar-ee-uh, is the Italian equivalent of “Hilary”. She speaks English pretty well, but not perfectly, so it is very charming. She has been so nice and helpful. She’s our best friend in Sorrento. I asked if I could take her picture and she smiled and took a nice pose for us. Every time we’ve traveled in Italy and asked someone if we could take a picture, they have always seemed happy for us to do so.

When we were walking back from the Marina Grande (our favorite spot in Sorrento) after having lunch there today, we passed this man laying stones in the walkway. We’ve been watching his progress for several days. We asked if we could take a picture and he said yes then indicated he wanted us to wait while he put his hat on for the picture.

We must have been jet-lagged. There is a knob by the sprayer that you pull out to switch the water from the waterfall fixture to the hand-held sprayer. We tried turning it before, to no avail. Overall the shower is great. The waterfall head is very nice.

Sorrento is on a peninsula that rises up about 1000 feet (just guessing, I’ll check later) from Sorrento to the peak and then down again on the southern side which is the Amali Coast. I hiked up to the high point which is a town called St. Agatha. I started out from Sorrento center and within 3-4 blocks I was on one of the little lanes which are all over Sorrento and most Italian towns. Here is the one I was walking on:

This is a street, a few cars and several scooters passed me as I walked up. The lane has high walls and goes by houses. Most houses have lemon and/or orange trees. Here is a yard that had some nice flowers;

My camera wanted to take a picture of my belt camera case which is really its home so I indulged it.

Now I am about half way. Here is a view back at Sorrento. That is Mt. Vesuvius in the background.

It is more of a trail now. No walls so you can see into people’s gardens. I saw one guy doing his spring rototilling.

Now it changes to an actual footpath, scooters not allowed. The St. agatha sign reassures me since my map was not accurate.

You go right by people’s houses. This dog followed me for a while then pushed the gate open to this house.

the footpath was quite steep. Even with my 5000-ft New Mexico-enhanced red blood cells I was getting pretty tired by this time.

I was kind of hoping I was closer to St. Agatha but you can see I was only 2/3 of the way. You can also see what kind of shoes I wore for the walk.

Now I am 80% of the way I guess. I turned and saw the sign directing me back to Sorrento. The guy in the sign looked so casual and jaunty “Oh I guess I’ll just pop down to Sorrento and back on these steps.”

Almost to the top, back on a regular street, these houses have nice views.

Finally I get to St. Agatha which is another town, smaller than Sorrento but with houses and stores, and, I was glad to see, a little place to get a bottle of water for 40 euro cents. Here is the view from a street in St. Agatha.

Now I’m on the way down. Here are a couple of nice scenes. It took me about a hour to go up and about 40 minutes to go back down. I started at 3:45 and got back about 5:30.

The Magi House has high-style bathrooms. The sink is slanted with a long thin drain from right to left. Here it is:

Rather like a slanted board you would beat your clothes on. But you can’t stop the drain so you couldn’t really wash anything in the sink. Maybe this is by design. The faucet is a bit high and it is not clear which way you turn to get hot water. It takes a lot of space, is high-style, but is not necessarily more functional.

The shower is even more high-tech. Here it is:

Low on the vertical bar is a part of the bar with the small label “Open”. This turns on the shower and reveals the label “Close” that was on the side. It took a little time to find this. the hot/cold mix is controlled by a small device at the very bottom. I never found this but the water temp was fine. Wynette found it. We still haven’t figured out how to turn on the side sprayer device.