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.