Europe 24 - Agerola

It was a slow morning in Agerola, which was partially due to the roosters and partially due to the fact that we were on vacation and such mornings are to be celebrated. But eventually we were all up and moving, getting laundry done, eating breakfast, watching random Olympic events (Italian television has surprisingly few commercials), and working out what we were going to do that day.

Our original plan was to find the Path of the Gods, a hiking trail that leads down the mountain from Agerola to the Amalfi Coast and which is said to have spectacular views of pretty much everything along the way, but this ran into a few practical difficulties.

For one thing, none of us are hikers. We’re academics. We like spectacular views, don’t get me wrong, but they aren’t something we are prepared to spend a day hiking down a mountain to find.

For another, everything we read about it seemed to indicate that it was best left to people more serious than ourselves about such things. People who were willing to spend the entire day doing this. People who had proper footwear and a collection of appropriate “gear.” People, in other words, who were not us. Antonia told us that the best way to do the Path of the Gods was to buy tickets to the ferry and private bus ahead of time because if you do this properly you’re going to spend several hours hiking down the mountain to one of the towns down by the sea and then get on a ferry to a much closer town and then try to get on a bus back to Agerola except that the public bus is usually full of such hikers and there is no particular guarantee that you’ll get a seat and it is a long walk back up the hill.

Suitably forewarned, we searched for alternatives and discovered that if we walked through town and out the other side for about twenty or thirty minutes we would end up at a lookout point where we could see a good chunk of the coast, and that seemed like a happy compromise.

So out we went.

It should be noted that this was the wide end of the series of driveways we had to navigate to get from our apartment back to the main road. Technically, it carried two-way traffic.

We turned left at the end of the driveway and walked up the main street to the piazza where the big church was, where we found a wedding in progress.

It must be a strange thing to schedule your wedding in a tourist town during the high season, even if it is where you live, because you just know that you will become part of the scenery for a whole lot of strangers and while those strangers will likely be happy to see you and wish you all the joy and happiness in the world the fact is that they’re also going to take photos and talk about it with other strangers who weren’t even there. But this is how you become part of many stories, I suppose, and there is something lovely about that as well.

We didn’t peek inside the church, obviously, but they had some nice things set up outside that we could see. There was a decorated antique Fiat Speck that was just adorable, and they had a sorbet cart ready to go for when it was all over. You have to hand it to them on that one.

It was interesting to watch it all – the wedding preparations, the tourists like ourselves who were watching things happen (most of whom had that vague smile that you get when you see something heartwarming), the crowd of family milling around waiting for things to get started so they could walk into the church – but eventually we tore ourselves away and headed through the piazza and onward toward the lookout point. It was a pleasant walk, as temperatures in Agerola were much cooler than in Rome – 82F/28C – and there was a lot to see along the way.

The little orange fruits were something of a mystery, though.

They grew on bushes and were about the size of apricots, but they had the texture of a volleyball and felt oddly deflated. We never did figure out what they were.

After a while we reached the lookout point.

While we couldn’t see the classic vibrantly colored Amalfi Coast vistas, the views were indeed more than spectacular enough to make up for it. The lookout point had several different levels and vantage spots and we spent a happy time trying them all out.

The thing about spectacular views, though, is that they don’t change much. You drink them all in for a while and then realize that if you stay there any longer you will not see anything different, and so you move on. The walk back felt a bit longer, as it was uphill and we were in search of a place to set our feet up and have something to drink, but it was still a lovely time of things. Eventually we found a little canopied area that had a good fountain for our water bottles and a kind of trellis overhead that kept the sun out even if it did mean the occasional small lizard plummeting down in front of us and then scurrying off. Tough things those lizards.

We made it back to the piazza and found a small café where they served gelato and beverages, and as we sat there the wedding ended so we finished up and went outside to watch. The bride seemed happy, the bells rang madly, the sorbet cart did land office business, and all was right with the world.

I wish them well.

Rather than going straight back to the apartment for siesta we decided to seek out one of the cheesemakers in Agerola. There are several of them in that fairly small town, and that was one of the reasons we were there in the first place. Some were closed, perhaps because of the wedding or perhaps because it was just August in Italy and that sort of thing happens, but there was one that was vaguely in the same direction as the apartment if we took a small detour so we headed up the side road past a number of things that were either very small farms or very large gardens in search of it.

Caseificio Green Valley doesn’t look like a going industrial concern from the outside. It looks like a house where someone completely lost control of a hobby of theirs – something that Kim and I are very familiar with, having sold cold-process soap on the craft show circuit in southern Wisconsin for seven years – and the main reason we knew we’d found it was because the neatly labeled delivery van was blocking the road.

There was someone working, however, and he was happy to let us in and have us look around the place a bit. He showed us some of the cheeses they were making and told us about them, and in the end we left with seven bocconcini – small balls of fresh mozzeralla each slightly smaller than a pool ball in a bag full of the liquid they had been floating in at the Caseificio – and a linked pair of caciocavalli, which are pear-shaped and about the size of a softball. We never did get to eat the caciocavalli and ended up leaving them with our hosts in the last town we stayed in before flying out of Italy because it would have been a shame to waste them, but the bocconcini were very good.

From there it was a quick walk back to the apartment for siesta. Naps were taken. Laundry was laundered. Olympic sporting events – mostly ocean-going things that were taking place in Tahiti of all places – were watched.

At one point I found myself pretty much the only person awake so I decided to go for a quick walkabout, just because I could. I walked away from the center of town for a bit until I got to the turnoff from the road we’d taken up the mountain, maybe a kilometer away. You can see the road back into town here.

I followed the road back into town, just taking it all in. I’m not really sure what was going on with the ants, but this wasn’t the only door they were painted on.

Eventually I found the piazza and decided to bear to the right rather than to the left and ended stumbling across the trailhead for the Path of the Gods, which is a fairly broad stone pathway at that point. I walked along for maybe ten minutes just to see if anything dramatic would appear but mostly it was just me and a couple about my age who were clearly wondering who I was and why I was following them and I didn’t speak enough Italian to say “because you’re going where I want to go” so we just continued along that way for a while until they turned off into a side path.

When I got back Kim went out and explored a bit on her own, and then we all hung out at the apartment for a while just enjoying the down time.

Dinner that night was at a place called La Corte degli Dei – “the court of the gods” – and it was the sort of place that would call itself that. It occupies the courtyard of the Palazzo Acampora, an 18th-century patrician residence formerly the home of the Acompora princes of Corfu. It’s the kind of restaurant where you are likely to be served by several different waiters (our main one reminded me a lot of Janusz from the most recent season of The Great British Bake Off), where the menu uses words like “seasonality,” and where the chef (not cook) likes to innovate within a tradition. I tend to be a bit more lowbrow in my tastes, but this really was a marvelous place.

There’s very little on the menu that is nut-safe, though, so while Kim and I had dishes from that night’s menu (I had a pasta with a cheese foam which was tasty if somewhat confusing to me while Kim had a pasta and seafood dish that she enjoyed) Oliver was in more of a bind. Fortunately we had contacted the restaurant before arriving in Agerola and they put together an off-menu steak and vegetables dish that was phenomenally good. Oliver said it was the best steak he has ever eaten, and having tried a small bit of it I can understand why. Really, a lovely place.

We followed this with a leisurely passegiata around the piazza before heading back to the apartment for the night.

Europe 24 - From Rome to Agerola

We got up fairly early by vacation standards so we could finish cleaning and packing up our stuff, because it was a travel day. It helps that we pack light on these trips and don’t make too much of a mess to start with, so it wasn’t that much of a task to get ready and out the door to the 718 Bus, which took us to the train station at Roma Ostiense.

One magazine shop and two incorrect platforms later we discovered we’d missed our train to Fiumicino Airport by about two minutes. Fortunately this was Europe where the next train was due in about fifteen minutes and not a week from the following Tuesday, so we waited on the platform until it arrived.

You never know about the tickets, though. Italian train tickets can get surprisingly complicated, which is a strange thing for an item that is sold in vending machines. You have to specify which train you want the ticket for when you buy it, and it’s kind of a guessing game if your ticket is good for only for that train or if you can still use it for the one after it. About halfway to the airport a conductor came through to check and he didn’t seem terribly bothered so we figured we were okay.

At the airport we walked the kilometer or two from the train platforms to the rental car area and eventually found the counter for the particular rental agency we’d booked our car with before we left.

It is quite a process, renting a car in Italy.

For one thing, there’s the prep work. This means not only do you have to fill out the usual forms and payments online ahead of time, but also you need to get an International Driving Permit before you arrive in the country. This permit must be carried with you at all times while driving or you will get a Ten Foot Ticket from the particular branch of the Italian police that patrols the highways. If you live in the US, in order to get one of these permits you have to go to your local AAA branch office and pay them $20. What practical function this serves other than to verify that you are the sort of person who can hand over $20 when asked is kind of a mystery, but such are the requirements.

For another thing, once you get to the actual rental agency you have to take a number and then wait until it is your turn to go up to the counter – a process that can take days – and then fill out the mind-numbing quantity of additional forms that are required on top of all the ones you (i.e. Kim) filled out online when actually making the reservation. We eventually got the Complete Coverage Insurance because at that point I was willing to sell them my left arm if they would just let us take a car, and it was worth it because the car came damaged and with only three-quarters of a tank of gas and when we returned it in Naples a week later they were rather ungracious about pretty much every part of that so at least they couldn’t charge us for the broken tail light or whatever else they were on about.

We ended up with a Jeep Renegade.

This was not the car they originally wanted to give us – that one would have been even larger, and having had experience driving in Italian towns and cities where the roads are about as wide as the average American dining table we knew that wouldn’t work. I will say the Fiumicino rental car staff were much nicer than the Naples staff and were very helpful in switching to the one we ended up with. It was an automatic which meant I could drive it as needed though in the end Kim did most of the driving and we were all much better off for that. Plus, as it turned out, having a more powerful car than last year’s Fiat Speck turned out to be useful on some of the roads that GoogleMaps took us down because GoogleMaps is always happy to inflict physical and psychological damage if it means saving you a hundred meters of driving.

Kitted out, we left the airport and headed to Ostia Antica.

Ostia Antica was the port city of ancient Rome, where much of Rome’s trade flowed into and out of the Mediterranean Sea. At its peak in the 3rd century CE there were about a hundred thousand people living there, though it began to decline as the Roman Empire did and eventually it fell into ruin. It’s a big site – the guy at the ticket booth said we could either do the walking tour on our own or pay a bit extra and take the shuttle all the way to the other side and walk the 9km back to the entrance. We chose the walking tour on a 37C/98F day, and he said that was probably smarter. “Most people only get about halfway anyway,” he told me, but I suppose if you do the math it’s about the same amount of walking.

It's an astonishing place, really, and even in high tourist season it was practically empty.

For one thing, there are an amazing number of buildings (or ruins thereof) still standing and you can walk right up to them. They’re just there, out in the open, waiting for you.

Some of them are bigger than others.

There are also reminders of what the buildings used to be, here and there.

As well as the remains of old roads, some of them still with cart tracks worn into them. They’re a bit of a trick to walk on these days since the sand and small gravel that filled in between the larger stones and made a smooth surface has long since washed away, but still fascinating if you like infrastructure the way I do.

We slowly made our way deeper into the ruins, marveling at the things on either side and enjoying the fairly steady breeze that made the heat bearable. There are even fountains here and there so you can refill your water bottle.

At one point we found an observation platform which had been put on top of one of the ruined buildings. It’s a short (if steep) climb up and you get a pretty good sense of the place from the top.

One of the fascinating things about Ostia Antica is the sheer number of mosaics that are still there. Ancient Romans loved mosaics and they’re everywhere at Ostia Antica. We got a good overhead view of some of them from the platform.

You can find mosaics wherever you look, though. This one is close to the entrance, for example.

With other mosaics it’s really obvious that this used to be a port. The coastline has shifted in the last couple thousand years, but the water once came right up to the city and it was an important part of its residents’ lives.

There were a couple of places in Ostia Antica that stood out, I thought.

For one thing there was what the map called Diana’s House, which to be honest looked like it should have been a café.

But my favorite place in Ostia Antica was the amphitheater. It’s a fairly big place, and remarkably well preserved – at least the seating area, anyway. There’s not much shade so you don’t stay there long but you can sit for a bit and then when you’re ready you can walk down to the stage area.

It’s the stage that makes you understand just what a marvel of engineering this place actually was. Roman amphitheaters were meant for speeches – they were auditoriums, places to hear, rather than theaters, which are places to see.

If you go down to the ground level – not the stage that they’ve recreated, but the flat area that fits inside the curve of the seats – there is a spot where the sound actually buzzes in your ear. The people who run Ostia Antica have helpfully put a small piece of artificial grass there so you know where you need to stand, and it’s absolutely astonishing what happens when you do. I started a couple of paces away, using my Teacher Voice to project up to where Kim and Oliver were sitting, and when I got to that spot it actually made me stop. My voice genuinely buzzed in my own ears when I stood there and spoke. It was also clearly audible throughout the place.

Naturally I had to share this, both with Kim and Oliver and with a random German tourist who happened by while we were there. We were all suitably impressed.

There are also ancient theatrical mask statues offstage right, in case you somehow didn’t get the point earlier.

I think in some ways the best photo I took at Ostia Antica, though, was this one. It’s not perhaps the most artistic photo and you may need to click on it to make it bigger to see everything, but there is something about the contrast between the ancient Roman walls and the airliner overhead that appeals to me.

Eventually it was time to go and we headed off into the nearby village to find some lunch, landing at the Pizzeria de Michele in part because we could actually park the car there. It was a one-man operation and he was quite gracious about the allergy cards. We ate on the stairs of the building next door.

Ostia Antica is not far from Fiumicino Airport, but we had much more driving to do that day. Our ultimate goal was the mountain village of Agerola overlooking the Amalfi Coast. We weren’t actually going to go down to the Amalfi Coast, though. At this time of year each tourist on the Amalfi Coast is allotted about half a square meter of space, and that just didn’t have any appeal at all. Agerola would be slower, less crowded, and much more our style.

We also had visions of stopping at Herculaneum on the way, if we had time. This did not happen.

It’s about three hours to Agerola from Ostia Antica on a good day and this turned out not to be a good day, starting with the wildfires that occasionally slowed things down as people stared at them.

Also, there was just the drive. There are some strange things about driving on Italian highways.

For one thing, I have never seen so many people insist on driving in multiple lanes at once. It was as if they couldn’t decide between two different lanes so they’d straddle the line until it became clear to them – by whatever unspoken criteria they were using – that one was superior to the other.

For another, this cavalier attitude toward lanes was on vivid display at the toll plazas. The highway between Ostia Antica and Naples (just north of Agerola) is a toll road, and open-road tolling has not reached Italy yet. So every now and then you must slot yourself into a lane and throw €2.30 into a machine so it will let you pass. You do this in cash, but it does give you change. We tried to do this at one toll plaza just outside of Naples and ended up spending about forty minutes watching people riding the shoulder and forcibly merging into whatever space they could intimidate the drivers already in the lane into giving up. All for the equivalent of $2.50.

We decided that perhaps Herculaneum could wait until the return trip and pushed on to Agerola.

Agerola, as noted, is a mountain town high above the coast. As you come south from Naples you start to climb up the mountains in ever-tighter hairpin turns through tiny little villages, each one narrower than the one before and each time you think to yourself, “this must be it” and it isn’t because there are yet more hairpin turns and yet more villages until finally you arrive and then you have to find the place where you’re staying, which turns out not to be obvious at all.

GoogleMaps said it was right there on the main street – the one main street in town, which meant a lot of traffic – but we couldn’t see it. So we squeezed as close to the side as we could and messaged our B&B host to see if they could lead us to where we needed to be. Eventually Antonia – the sister of the host, it turned out – found us and led us back through a series of driveways that got narrower and narrower until we finally emerged into a parking area where we parked the car and declared that the next time it would move would be when we left. On the way out we figured out how to get the side mirrors to fold in which helped a bit, but that’s a story for another day.

It was a lovely apartment, and Antonia was a gracious and friendly host. It was very music-themed – the owner is a musician and there’s an SD-card-operated sound system, complete with an entire card full of his music. There was also a little porch where we could sit and look over the town. Antonia showed us around the place and told us to let her know if we needed anything as she lived on the floor below us, and we happily settled in for a bit.

Outside our bedroom windows was a small chicken run, complete with roosters who were happy to tell us all about it the next morning and thus we learned to keep the windows shut at night.

It was still fairly early so after a while we went out to see the town. It’s a really pretty little town in some ways, though not so much that you forget that people actually live there. That’s a nice balance to strike.

The main piazza in town has the big church, and there’s another one not all that far away.

If you stand in front of the big church and look across the piazza, this is what you see.

The piazza is lined with shops and full of traffic trying to get down the switchback roads to the Amalfi Coast below. We decided we’d see what the shops were about and ended up at a deli where the woman behind the counter actually cut things for us by hand rather than use the slicer that had been last used for mortadella, a sausage that contains pistachios. We bought a fair amount of things there for breakfasts and snacking because if someone is willing to do that for you then you should buy things there. It was good stuff. I also wandered into a little souvenir place and found my keychain – I collect them from wherever we go and use them as Christmas ornaments. They’re inexpensive, indestructible, and a nice reminder of places and people. And on the way back toward the apartment we ran into a friendly kitty so naturally we had to stop for a bit.

We ate dinner at a place called Picchio Rosso – the sort of family restaurant where the kids run in and out playing games when not manning the cash register and there are pictures of the grandparents on the wall. It was lovely, and if you ever find yourself in Agerola, gentle reader, you may eat there with full confidence.

It was a short walk back to the apartment and we hung out on the little porch watching the night sky until it got too late, and that’s not a bad way to end a day at all.