August 7, 2004
ATRANI -- After the intensity of Naples, I made my way to a tiny seaside town on the Amalfi coast, just south of Naples. The town of Atrani is, in fact, less than a fifteen minute walk from its much more famous neighbor Amalfi, but it remains (comparatively) unknown and untouristed. I went to Atrani on the recommendation of a fellow hosteller at Giovanni's (whom I had actually met twice before, in Florence and Rome -- one begins to see the same faces over and over on a trip like this), and also because it had a nice reasonable hostel, unlike most of the towns on the coast, which are incredibly expensive. The coast is famous internationally for its beautiful landscape: tall cliffs plunge into the warm Mediterranean, pausing at the occasional sand beach, while compact towns cling to the rocks beneath terraced lemon groves. The towns are accessible only by scenic but terrifying mountain roads, or by calmer but more expensive ferries. Traveling within the towns must be done mostly on foot. The bigger towns of Amalfi and Positano have a few roads for vehicle traffic, but in the smaller towns there is no option but to climb up and down stairs and thread through the whitewashed alleyways that wind among the houses and shops. I think the residents of these towns must be very fit.
I had only been in Atrani a few hours, enough time to shower and explore the town a little bit, when I sat on the beach for a spell and met a very friendly Italian named Vincenzo. Vincenzo is a computer science student from a small town some 30 miles down the coast where the country is more flat, visiting Atrani for a short holiday of sun and sea. He had come with a friend, but the friend had left early, so he was happy to find a fellow solo traveler. Vincenzo showed me around Amalfi, indicated the best budget pizzeria, and gave me a crash course in Italian. He, like most Italians, is very proud of his language, insisting that the Italian grammar is more complex and the Italian vocabulary more nuanced than those of any other language. He also kept asking me to talk to his friends and family on his mobile phone, explaining that "they don't believe you're American." After the third "conversation" with a non-English speaker, I finally caught on to his game.
The following morning, Vincenzo and I put all those stairways to use by taking the foot path to the nearby town of Ravello. Ravello is probably something like one or two miles from Atrani, as viewed on a map, but Atrani is at the coast while Ravello is some 1000 feet above on the cliffs. The hour-long hike took us past lemon and grape groves, scattered houses, and vista after beautiful vista. We also met a very friendly stray dog who followed us up the moutain, apparently just for compaionship. When we reached a stretch of road and the dog demonstrated his poor understanding of how traffic works, we had to send him back down the mountain to the pedestrian area. Upon reaching Ravello, we were greeted by an incredibly picturesque town filled with flowered terraces leaning off into space. Our return to Atrani was just in time to beach-bum our way through the hot part of the day.
Once back at the hostel, I ran into about four people I had met at Giovanni's place in Naples. Some of us re-congregated in the evening, after another pizza dinner, on the beach, and tried to enjoy the regional specialty known as limoncello. This remarkably strong liquer tastes (as put by the New Zealander who had brought it) "like lemons and burning," but at least Vincenzo liked it, and it made a centerpiece for a cool and pleaant evening of travel stories. Vincenzo also explained to us one of the other regional specialties, mozzarella di buffala. Unlike "fake" mozzarella, which doesn't have much taste, real buffala milk produces a cheese of unusually pleasant creamy flavor. My friend C. from Pompeii had also recommended it to me, exhorting me to "eat as much as you possibly can while it's cheap," since the genuine article back in the States is rather pricey. I had had a sandwich for lunch made of tomatoes and mozzarella di buffala, and I was willing to believe in its virtues.
The following day, and my last in Atrani, I ran into the Dutch girls from Giovanni's again. We spent the early afternoon on the beach, and in the late evening took the ferry to the nearby resort town of Positano. One of the three "perforated" mountains in the world is supposed to be there, but we couldn't tell which one it was. What we could see was a beautiful and wealthy town, which streets lined with boutiques and covered with flower trestles (okay, there was only one street covered with flower trestles, but that's more than most towns). Stumbling upon an inexpensive grocery high above the main part of town, we decided to make a dinner of it, and I made my dinner of a whole-wheat loaf and a whole bag of mozzarella di buffala, followed by that old Italian standby, gelato. When we returned to Amalfi, we climbed down from the bus to find ourselves nearly on top of the Miss Amalfi 2004 beauty pageant. One of the Dutch girls told me that Italians have more beauty pageants than any other country, and it wouldn't surprise me, but as we all had early trains to catch, we called it a night without staying to find out who is the new Miss Amalfi.