haymee.com - travel - past - santa maria di castellabate

A short description of a week's trip to our friends' guesthouse in southern Italy

Tuesday 19th September 2006
Up at a civilised hour, because this holiday we have chosen evening flights.

Taxi booked, last-minute items packed, internet weather service consulted - 26°-28° for the rest of the week - and a final check around the flat, a few more tunes loaded onto the iPods, and we're off, collected in an enormous 8-seater taxi sent for our inspection by the company we intend using for our wedding transport when we get back.

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OK - we wonder after the train to Gatwick and the shuttle to the North Terminal - why did we arrive over three hours before the flight? We heeded the headlines anticipating vast queues, but there were no queues at all at the automatic check-in, and... exactly four people in line at the security check. Lip-salve confiscated, belts and shoes removed, an almost indecent body search, and we were through into the vast shopping centre that all airports have now become - where we could buy anything we liked, including lip-salves, to take on board.

Boring, boring, boring wait until we left bang on time at 1815 on board a British Airways B737-436, into a darkening sky.

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As we approached Napoli, the settlements below appeared to me as gold and silver jewelery laid out on a black cloth; an occasional glint or sparkle coming from a headlight, or a streetlight briefly revealed. A spotlight was switched on on the end of the wing, illuminating a vapour trail coming off the end of the extended flaps, looking like a twisted grey crepe paper streamer.

A one bounce landing was followed by the disconcerting Continental custom of applause throughout the cabin.

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I always want to push to the front of the immigration queue, brandishing my passport and saying, "I'm British, let me through" but I have thus far resisted, I'm pleased to say.

~ ~ ~

Darren was waiting for us, and the drive to Santa Maria seemed safer than the same journey had three years ago, perhaps because it was so late. There were a few lunatic Neapolitan drivers, though, just to make things seem normal.

Getting out of the car at the villa we were immediately struck by the quiet, and the vast field of stars over our heads.

Wednesday 20th September 2006
Yesterday was a long day, and we slept well as a consequence. With breakfast strictly at 9am, there was to be no lying in. This visit we have our own en-suite shower-room, and a large bedroom. Steve unpacked, we showered, then met the other guests at the giant, outdoor breakfast table. Three ladies from the West Midlands are going back home this morning, and three generations of a Scottish family are here until the weekend. The grandfather, a surprising 86, was here in southern Italy in 1944 with occupying forces, and witnessed the eruption of Vesuvius.

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Just now we are sitting quietly in a beach bar, possibly called Café Mexico (according to the saucers) or Conté Massimo (according to the ashtray), enjoying coffees and reading yesterday's Daily Mail (which we found lying around, I hasten to add). The sea looks gorgeous below a cloudless sky, and this bit of the beach, in stark comparison to the walk here, and other beaches hereabouts, is relatively litter-free and clean.

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After a while we walked through the village, along the street of siesta-closed small shops and gellateria, replacing my lip-salve at the farmacia, and then eating squares of pizza outside a café and drinking our first Peroni.

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Later we walked back the way we had come - through the narrow streets and along the promenade, and past the old boatyard and to the beach café near the car park. We sat, talked, ate a plate of frites and read a little. A tiny lizard scuttled along, eating ants; the sea sloshed against the beach below us; the sea breeze cooled us.

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And now, back at Villa Maria, Steve sleeps upstairs, the place is quiet, and I'm sitting in the shade in the front garden.

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Coincidentally, Karen and Darren decided to eat out at the same pizzeria as us tonight - their recommendation in any case - Charlie's in the village. Run by an Italian and his English-speaking German wife, they served me my first calzone, a folded over pizza stuffed with filling like a kind of giant pizza pasty. Delicious, and washed down with half a bottle of local red.

The coincidence of venue meant a free lift , and when we got back we polished off the bottle of Chianti we had started before the trip out. Boy am I ready for sleep now!

Thursday 21st September 2006
Today we have been on an adventure! We set off with Karen and Darren a little after breakfast, in their Nissan Serena mini-van, for the ruins of Herculaneum. Last visit, as you know, we went to see Pompeii, which was destroyed by a devastating rain of ash and pumice from the AD79 eruption of Vesuvius. But Herculaneum, on the other side of the mountain, was caught in a torrent of mud from the erupting volcano, which better preserved the ancient town.

To walk around today, it is much more compact than its more famous sister-in-destruction, but far better preserved, buried as it was for centuries under an enormous layer of mud, earth, and then the ever-encroaching suburbs of Naples. Today the entrance is just a gateway in a Neapolitan street. The excavations, by no means complete, are some way down below the level of the surrounding modern city, and consist of three main streets, and the connecting cross streets of a sizeable grid. Some buildings have a complete upper storey, and there are even preserved wooden door-frames in places. As with our visit to Pompeii, I was astonished to find that in all but a few cases we could walk on the mosaic floors, and touch the plaster wall decorations and paintings.

Pompeii had been a commercial city, and the buildings and cart-wheel-rutted streets had reflected this, whereas Herculaneum was more a seaside resort for richer Romans, so had fewer businesses and more pedestrianised residential areas.

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After we left Herculaneum and re-emerged into the modern world, we grabbed a couple of rolls from a nearby café and headed for the next part of the adventure. Darren (more and more in the manner of an Italian driver) took us round the hairpin bends of the lower slopes of Vesuvius until after at least half an hour of driving we reached the car park. From there, hired birch sticks in hand, the four of us set off on a forty minute trek up to the very summit of the mountain.

The path, like the road up to that point, was a series of short, steep sections along the side of the almost conical summit, punctuated by hairpin turns, at each of which a bench had been thoughtfully provided. Mind you, the temptations to stop weren't just motivated by the need to rest, because the views were becoming increasingly arresting.

At last, at the end of one particularly challenging, long, steep stretch of the gravelly, pumice-strewn path, we arrived at the edge of the massive, circular caldera, and what a demonstration of nature's awesome power: a huge, deep, funnel-shaped hole in the top of the mountain, created by centuries - millennia - of eruptions; solid strata of rock heaved upwards; steam, or smoke, issuing still from a vent inside the caldera.

At intervals, collections of instruments, listening for signs that the benign giant was waking, protected the hundreds of thousands of Italians who still choose to live well within the areas devastated in AD79 and in subsequent eruptions up to and including 1944, by promising to provide at least some early warning of the next.

The path allowed us to walk around approximately half of the ridge, but after a while the draw of the views tore us away from the mighty volcano itself. Naples sprawled in the sunshine, fingers of itself spreading into neighbouring towns so that a kind of viral network of habitation covered one whole quarter of our field of view, even disappearing round the side of Vesuvius' twin, Somma.

A haze covering the horizon seamlessly blended sun-reflecting sea and bright sky; the islands of Capri and Ischia blurrily faint somewhere in between. Trails from cruise ships, fishing boats and cargo vessels broke up the otherwise featureless blue sea, in and out of the ports and marinas around the whole Bay of Naples, all visible to us from our vantage 3500m above the centre of the arc of the bay.

We spent some considerable time drinking in these amazing sights, and then after choosing a small lump of volcanic rock each from the ground, we set off down again. An easier journey, but tricky nevertheless because of the slipperiness underfoot. At intervals the path forced us through tacky gift shacks, at each of which a small car - usually a Fiat Panda - was parked. Pity the stallholders who had to negotiate this path twice a day, with its sheer drops and loose surface, in a car!

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The drive back took us along the autostrada again, then we diverted to the quieter coast road, passing close to two of the beautifully-preserved Greek temples at Paestum.

We got back tired but very happy to have experienced something so unusual and powerful. In today's busy world of concentrated work and long days, it's important to take time out to see the world around us, the power of the planet that so precariously supports us.

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Darren dropped us in town later with a dizzying set of restaurant and bar recommendations and directions spinning through our heads, and we eventually settled at an outside table of the restaurant of the Hotel Pergola, near the centre of the main shopping street of Santa Maria, alive at this hour of the evening, in contrast with its sleepiness during the middle of the day.

Steve's calzone was enjoyable, but not as generously stuffed as mine the night before, and my salame pizza wasn't exactly liberally studded with salame, but the ice-cream at the end more than compensated!

We stopped for another Peroni at a bar on the way back we have often seen but never visited before, and arrived back to a sleeping villa. We were very soon a part of the sleeping villa ourselves...

Friday 22nd September 2006
Today we have a lazy day planned - just sitting in the shade of the gazebo, reading and writing, and occasionally out in the sun. Because a fridge is no longer available to Villa Maria guests - in contrast to previous years - we have no way of bringing back bread, cheese, meats, salad and so on for an al fresco lunch or light evening meal, which is inconvenient. Steve went to search the local, rather bare, mini-market at the end of the road, but only managed to find a large bag of crisps and a plastic pot of prunes ("Viva La Prugna" it shouts on the front) as the only practical lunch.

We took a break to use Karen's laptop to look over some documents which Roxana had e-mailed us, and spent the rest of the day at leisure.

Darren was out with the Scottish clan on the Amalfi Drive tour, Karen was asleep most of the afternoon, and I caught up on my reading.

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Darren returned, and he and Karen drove us into town; firstly to the Spar supermarket for them to shop for provisions, and where we bought a few non-perishable items for a snack lunch on Sunday; then we parked closer to town and walked right through to Il Cantuccio, a friendly restaurant where we all had a very pleasant meal over a good couple of hours. It was our treat, a celebration of Darren's birthday next weekend, and our impending partnership ceremony, well lubricated with white wine. We somewhat staggered back, and Steve asked Darren to make him a cocktail. Darren struggled to remember, then read, the list of ingredients, but manfully managed to produce it anyway. We sat outside quietly, listening to an Italian version of the Twilight Barking which Dodie Smith so memorably described in The 101 Dalmatians.

I crashed out in bed , the room spinning more than slightly, while Steve stayed downstairs finishing his cocktail, called, appropriately, Late Night At The Villa.

Saturday 23rd September 2006
Woke up to my fourth mozzie bite. After breakfast we walked to the Saturday morning market in Santa Maria. Three years ago I bought a very nice pair of black shoes there very cheaply, which I still wear when required to. This time I was on the lookout for a similar pair of brown shoes, which I found, for just €10. We had a wander through the village, stopped a couple of times for coffees, took a load of photos, then made the long, hot walk back, to consume some rolls and cheese we'd picked up at the deli.

While we were eating I realised I didn't have the shoes with me: I'd left them somewhere. A quick look through the photos (hurrah for digital!) established when I'd last been carrying them, and luckily Darren was about to drive into town, in fact to the very bar-café where I believed I'd left the shoes, so I had a lift, and a handy translator. The shoes were indeed there, safe behind the counter, and I left Darren to watch the Sky football while I headed back for the second time, along the promenade, beach, car park and road towards the villa - a journey taking twenty-five minutes of brisk walking.

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Siesta time...

~ ~ ~

Today, generally, I feel a little bit 'bleh', mainly I think from an over-indulgence last night. We walked to the beach-bar around 8.30, where they were not too busy but had started serving food. We each had a simple pasta dish and a Peroni, then moved on to 'Bar Blue Eyes' again for some more drinks , and because it is a tabac and I was getting low on cigs.

We got back long after the Scottish family would have retired, as they have a very early start tomorrow for the airport; so we wrote and left them a goodbye note.

Just by the way - I'm on my third roaming ltalian mobile phone company today. I started with Vodaphone Italia, then the ubiquitous TIM, and now I'm with I WIND, apparently.

Sunday 24th September 2006
Not much to write about today, other than the increasing number of bites which are really annoying me.

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Darren returned from the airport with a Welsh family - mother, father, 4-year-old, toddler, and grand-parents - a nice bunch.

On our way to Charlie's restaurant in the mini-van we passed them, about to discover that their choice of restaurant just along the road was closed, so we lifted them into town.

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Another stop at 'Bar Blue Eyes' on the way back, and early to bed. Rain is threatened for tomorrow, but if it keeps clear we're planning to go to Castellabate, a medieval village in the mountains.

Monday 25th September 2006
And this morning we are indeed up in Castellabate, sitting in Piazza 10 Ottobre 1123 outside a bar, drinking tiny, expensive cappuccinos, enjoying stunning views acros the valleys of Campania. A noisy, but good-humoured, group of Dutch tourists, are filling the square with laughter.

We looked around the church, with its astonishing windows in the shape of bells, and its tall stone bell tower. The square outside is paved in a herringbone pattern of small terracotta tiles. The streets are narrow, twisting, with shallow cobbled steps everywhere, not for the infirm. The Italians' fondness for apparently make-shift electrical wiring is evident along the outside of most of the buildings.

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Today's weather has been, at best, variable. In started to rain in Castellabate just as we waited for Darren to pick us up, and he drove us back with wipers working furiously.

We'd been invited by Karen and Darren for a barbecue this evening at Villa Maria, so we watched as Darren cooked some fish and Karen made salad. The wind got up, but we sat at the enormous wooden table (where we eat braeakfast each morning) and enjoyed a fabulous Mediterranean meal, and then as the rain started, we moved indoors and got through several bottles of wine and some lively conversation. Then the storm, long-threatened, really kicked in, and with cocktails drunk and D & K off to bed, we sat in the porch and watched the lightning illuminate the sky around Santa Maria as the thunder echoed off the mountains.

A great evening: we were well-fed and nicely lubricated, and seemingly at the mercy of nature's worst, yet feeling completely safe in Villa Maria.

Tuesday 26th September 2006
One heck of a storm last night has left the air clearer, and the sea green and choppy. We're packed and ready, and have just spent a few minutes this morning in a café in town polishing our guest-book entry to write in before Darren takes us to the airport at 6.30 this evening.

Buses in southern Italy, we have decided, are pointless. Or at least their timetables are. We sat in the sun in the appointed piazza at the time listed on the orare (timetable), but the bus, she did not come. Even after waiting forty minutes past the listed time. So we gave up, and walked, for a change along the road, to Villa Maria. It's a slightly longer route than following the promenade and beaches, but had the advantage of being essentially flat.

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Then we hung aimlessly around the villa, waiting. Steve watched a film on video, and I got stuck into 'Brideshead Revisited', which I regret I've never read before. I bought it as a kind of pair with 'The Line Of Beauty' by Alan Hollinghurst, as it seems to me the themes are in many ways related; but just before we flew out Steve bought me 'Space Race', a very detailed and thoroughly-researched history of the race between Werner Von Braun (late of Hitler's devastating V2 rocket project), working for the American military and then NASA, and Sergei Korolev, a Soviet engineer whose very existence was kept top secret, in their quest to be first to put a man into space (the Russkies won), and then on to the Moon (the Yanks won that one).

Anyway, I polished off 'Space Race' after reading around half a Granta, and so have only started to wade into 'Brideshead' today really. 'The Line Of Beauty' remains in the case, untouched.

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When Karen returned from some meetings in town in the mini-van, we said our goodbyes to her, and Darren drove us, in the darkening evening, to the airport. It's a heck of a run - an hour and three-quarters - on roads shared with some pretty poor drivers, and I don't envy him the three or four runs he does every week. Give me the M25 and the M6 and the other British motorways any day.

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Huge queue to check in, and then all the eating places started closing one by one. The single cash machine didn't work, and almost no-one took credit cards. We ended up with two expensive and rather bland toasted sandwiches, and some chocolate. Still, we got an excellent deal on a litre of Bombay Sapphire, so all was not lost.

~ ~ ~

At the moment we're at 32,000 feet, probably somewhere over the Alps. We've had our sandwiches and coffee, and around me (it's 12.25am Italian time, 11.25pm UK time) people are dozing, or reading. I hope the trains are running from Gatwick!

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Well yes they were, but we had a fifty-five minute wait. Britain is full of 'attitude', as usual, even at two in the morning. Always sad to get home after a holiday, and we have had a really nice time with D & K at Villa Maria. Thanks folks!