Pt2 - 16:

SORRENTO, POMPEII, AMALFI

 

I like riding trains. They’re the only form of public transport which takes you behind the film set façades and right into people’s backyards, a voyeur’s view of local life. As the 9:20 for Naples trundled out of Roma Termini, past the apartment blocks and on through the suburbs, a glimpse into the tiny yards told you who lived where; from the disorder of young families strewn with swings and scooters and bicycles to the manicured plots of more organised residents to the productive patches of urban market gardeners, some with modest outdoor settings where there was just enough space; clotheslines hung with overalls, sheets, shirts, skirts and knickers. Were it not for the pocket-sized blocks and the signs in Italian we could’ve been in suburban Melbourne.

Once beyond the urban sprawl the train gathered speed and raced through rolling green farmlands dotted with large hay rolls and flocks of sheep and embroidered with red tissue-paper poppies and yellow everlastings. Venerable oak trees flanked the track almost to the edge of Naples where the country flattened out on the coastal littoral.

Acutely aware of its reputation for slick pickpockets we virtually raced through Naples Centrale, grabbed our tickets for the Circumvesuviana, flew down the long flight of stairs and piled out onto the platform exactly too late for the 1:20 to Sorrento. The station refilled so quickly that by the time the next train arrived at 2 it was standing room only, which I did for the thirty-two stations and ninety minutes it took to finally reach the Home of Gnocchi.

We checked in to the Hotel Mara and made our way uptown to get orientated. What we got instead was irritated by a half-arsed reception at the tourist office and a map which was so useful it would’ve made good dunny paper if it wasn’t laminated. We seated ourselves outside the Fauno Bar on Piazza Tasso to drink beer and take in the passing parade. It was an intoxicating spectacle, mostly due to the cloud of carbon monoxide belching from the incessant traffic and trapped in the thick, immobile air. The noise was unbelievable, but what it lacked in ambience it made up for in armies of overweight American tourists and radioactively sunburned Englanders "doing" Sorrento on their few hours’ shore leave from the armada of cruise liners in the harbour below. We drank more beer, ordered fish and chips and Tortellini con Panno and a bottle of the house red, all of which turned out to be the saving grace of the Fauno Bar and, finally spun out by the racket, the fumes and the red, wobbled off back to the Mara.

*

By now we are seasoned travellers, a long way both literally and figuratively from the two rubes who boarded the plane in Perth 94 days ago, but the fact we could barely drag ourselves out of bed this morning made us realise that the punishing pace we’ve been keeping since Naxos is just not sustainable. We have no option but to give ourselves at least one day of complete rest and considering the ks we’ve racked up in those ten days by boat and plane and road and train we didn’t need convincing we’d bloody well earned it. On top of the physical fatigue we’d also hit a mental wall; the constant demands of travel where nothing can be taken for granted and even ordering a coffee requires research, let alone studying timetables, organising transport, developing and evaluating alternative strategies, making bookings, driving left-hand on foreign roads, negotiating cities, making phone calls, finding accommodation, sleeping in a different bed every night, hauling your pack around, maintaining perpetual security hyper-vigilance, adapting to cultural expectations and linguistic challenges had brought us to the verge of burnout, a luxury you can’t afford on the road. Our emotional and psychological responses yesterday to our treatment in the tourist office, the relentless traffic, the swarm of tourists and the din on Piazza Tasso warned us we were dangerously low on patience and humour, two of the most critical assets in this game.

So mid-morning we set off with togs and towels for the beach, which actually turned out to be a “beach”. Access was via the hotel lift, 100 meters straight down through a shaft hewn into the rock. The doors opened into a tunnel through which we could glimpse the glimmering blue Tyrrhenian Sea in the distance. As we stepped out of the lift an attendant seated at a table to the right took our L5,000 (A$4) and gave us a ticket for the deckchairs which were ours for the day if we could handle the pace. Being Australian I have a philosophical aversion to paying for the beach but here it’s like paid parking, the only way to guarantee yourself some space, so suck it up sunshine. And sun shining it was out on the large boulders that constitute the beach along this steep coastline. A wooden deck extended across the rocks and about four meters out over the water from which one descended the steps to immerse oneself in the cool waters of the Gulf of Naples. Wrestling with the question of what happens to the effluent from the bay’s densely developed shoreline and the cruise ships riding at anchor just offshore one was reluctant to expose one’s orifices, settling instead for lowering oneself to the neck. The floating fruit peels and the oily sheen on the surface enhanced the impression that all wasn’t what it seemed in this renowned playground. But I quibble; the several hours we spent luxuriously lounging on the comfortable deckchairs and lightly sauteing ourselves in our own juices were precisely what we needed.

Later we passed a few more hours in a convivial pub on a quiet backstreet that served pints of chilled Stella of the Artois variety and gnocchi in various delicious confections. Feeling recharged, and with Pompeii in prospect for the morrow, we repaired for an early night.

*

Way back when we began planning this grand adventure Pompeii was high on the “must see” list and I’d been looking forward to it with escalating excitement for the last few weeks. I won’t bore you with the deeply unfunny fiasco of trying to get a bus ticket to anywhere down here, but we eventually outwitted the petty officials and found ourselves at the site early enough to beat the inevitable crush and the rising mercury. Here is a unique record of Roman life, enshrined in ash when Vesuvius erupted in 79AD. The volcano dominates every aspect on this peninsula, from Sorrento to the gates of Pompeii to Naples itself. Pompeii is profoundly impressive, not for its monumentality but for the exact opposite, its extraordinary window on the ordinary, the minutiae of everyday life, and you can’t come away without feeling connected in the most human way with the people who once walked its streets, worked in its shops and resided in its glamorous villas.

The four hours we budgeted for our visit became six without us even noticing. It will seem like an anticlimax but rather than try to describe everything we saw in detail, and we saw an awful lot in an awful lot of detail, here are the impressions indelibly etched into memory: the sense of lives lived, the shops, the market, the forum, the fast food joint with the day’s takings – 643 coins – in a jar, 2000 year old pizza ovens, political graffiti, pets, the amphitheatre and palaestra, ruts carved out in the cobbled streets by chariot and carriage wheels, Vesuvius framed by Caligula’s gate, pedestrian crossings, awnings, the brothel, mosaics, trompe l’oeil, fountains and plumbing, the durability of Roman cement, barrel tiles looking like they’d been fitted yesterday, plaster casts of victims in the rictus of death, the account of Pliny the Younger and the history of excavation…

In Pompeii it came more naturally than any other archaeological site to hear the music of human life, the cheers as you emerged into the stadium, to nod to Drusus as you passed him in the street…

So absorbed were we in the endless, extensive revelations of Pompeii, so lost were we in our imaginations that we entirely failed to register how far we walked on what became an extremely hot day until we boarded the train back to Sorrento. Fortunately we fell into a seat because I doubt we could have stood for the relatively short distance. We made a beeline for the cool pub where we ate and drank last night and ate and drank until sundown. We were so spent we even slept through the 2am garbage collection at the Mara.

*

We boarded the blue bus for Amalfi at 10. Actually, I lie – what really happened was an object lesson in how efficient and organised bus transport in this part of Italy isn’t. We arrived at the terminus early and climbed aboard the colour-coded blue bus with “Amalfi” in its destination window. The bloody thing was already bursting; the seats with bratty, bubble gum chewing German schoolkids and the aisles with elderly locals and war weary travellers like ourselves. We stood there sweating in the gathering heat, and stood there…and stood there…At 9:59 another blue bus pulled in beside us with “Amalfi” in the window so we leapt off, raced across and grabbed a seat towards the rear of the bus, which pulled out almost immediately leaving the first bus baking in the sun. We sincerely hoped the German schoolkids would fry there.

We almost died on the road to Positano. Our driver, let’s call him Maurizio Maniac, clearly had but one aim this morning – to scare the shit out of his foreign passengers. Judging by the gasps and barely suppressed screams he largely succeeded, although compared to Ali on the East Delta bus to St Catherine he was the pox doctor’s apprentice; hell, he even had two eyes. For a soundtrack he rode the horn, which reminded me of one of those bulb honkers on clown bikes at the circus, on every blind corner. I distracted myself with videoing the narrow, winding, vertiginous road and the landscape blurring past the panorama windows. I visualised the headlines: “Bus plunges into ravine near Positano killing all on board. An eyewitness described hearing the horn all the way down. “He sure was in a hurry to get to the bottom,” they said…” I’d worry when we went over the edge, though I knew we wouldn’t. These guys do this for a living, it’s how they get their jollies. It put me in mind of that nice little irony, the driving school in Cairo.

The coastline was undeniably dramatic. Sumptuous villas grew like fungi off the steep grey cliffs above the blue Tyrrhenian Sea, here called the Gulf of Salerno. We sped through narrow cuttings and short tunnels and our arses hung out over the water more than once on the journey to Positano. Although pretty, Positano didn’t do much for us; we stayed just long enough to enjoy cappuccinos with a view and jumped the next bus for the final leg down to Amalfi. The new driver, Luigi Loony, inspired such terror on the short trip that two American women and even Tess, a survivor of the Sinai, fell down the steps at Amalfi and kissed the ground.

Amalfi is all reputation and no substance. This might seem a harsh assessment on the strength of an hour’s visit, but I wouldn’t swap it for Meelup, put it that way. It’s a pleasant enough place but you’d really only brave the bus ride to say you’ve driven the Amalfi Coast. The day was a scorcher, my t-shirt sweat-stuck to my back; it was hot enough to force us to the far end of the beach where we hit the cool water in our clothes.

Suitably unimpressed, we ambled back in to town for the 2:30 fun park ride back to Sorrento, and who should we meet there but the gum-chewing brats from Chermany. We derived no small satisfaction elbowing them out of the way to grab a decent seat. It gave us even greater joy when the bus broke down ten minutes shy of Sorrento to completely outmanoeuvre them, courtesy Tess, as we swapped buses. She’d alighted on spec just as the replacement bus arrived and was first up the steps as the doors swung open. I sauntered casually across to climb aboard, the brats racing furiously past, weaving in and out of the other passengers and flailing them with their bags in the process. I rejoiced when, now comfortably seated next to Tess, I noticed their teacher missed out on a seat when the music finally stopped; served him right, I thought, for not cultivating more respect in his charges.

We survived the last frantic leg with Harry Hoon, dined again at the cool pub and retired for another early one in preparation for the long day’s journey north to Florence.

Next week: The Home of ART...