On Tuesday morning, we said goodbye to David at the Rome airport. He had to get back to the office, while the rest of us had to get to the Amalfi Coast!
Ten years ago during our big Europe trip, my family was planning on staying in Naples until our travel agent horrified us with one too many mafia stories. So we changed our itinerary and decided to stay in Sorrento, a beautiful coastal town in Naples Bay, instead. This was the best decision of the trip! We loved it there and we were all looking forward to heading back!
Elizabeth and Carrie were sleepy from the early morning flight to Naples, but we made them stay awake for the coastal drive.
And once we arrived in Sorrento, we immediately changed into our uniforms for the rest of the week – swimsuits and flip flops!
After we got into the water, Elizabeth exclaimed that this was her favorite part of the trip so far! After all that history, all those amazing sites, all the food – swimming in the Mediterranean was her favorite thing!
Elizabeth does look pretty happy in this picture!
We spent the rest of the day hanging out on the beach, which in Sorrento is more like a private deck. There aren’t very many sandy beaches around, so we paid a few Euros for access to the water from the deck and some chairs. Umbrellas were extra!
The towns along the Amalfi Coast are built on top of sheer cliffs that overlook the Mediterranean. So the city centers are always at the top of the cliffs and the beaches are below. They’ve built these really cool pathways through the cliff rock for people to walk down to the beaches and ferries. They’re like mini-caves. Last time we were in Sorrento, we stayed in the city center. This time around we wanted to be on the water, so we stayed in the fishing-village area of town. This felt like a different town altogether, away from all of the other tourists. Every night, a group of older men would get together to watch the sunset on a bench next to the fishing boats and kids would play in the street while their moms and grandmothers watched them from their apartment balconies.
The little restaurants in this area were all family-owned, with the owners greeting and serving you. And all of the seafood was obviously very fresh, coming straight off the boats docked next door to the restaurants. One night Dad ordered the fried seafood platter, not realizing the seafood was literally fished out of the ocean, dropped in a deep fryer, and then put on his plate. He had to pick it apart, bones, eyeballs, everything before eating it.
After a long day of flying and driving and swimming, we hiked up the many, many steps to the city center and grabbed dinner and gelato. The gelato was well worth the hike!
On Wednesday morning, we took the ferry across the bay to the Island of Capri. You can see the island from Sorrento and we had wanted to visit last time but never got around to it, so this time we made a point to just get on the ferry and go! There was no pre-planning done on anyone’s part, so once we were on the ferry, we signed up for a tour of the island with 15 other tourists.
Once we docked, our tour guide led everyone to a teeny-tiny bus and crammed us all inside. It was one of the scariest bus rides of my life. With all the stairs and now the terrifying bus ride, this area of Italy was reminding me more and more of Greece. Carrie, who’s afraid of heights, kept it together really well as we rode along. The woman across from her was not as brave and could barely hold back her tears.
We drove around the island from the Marina Grande to the Blue Grotto, a cave bathed in iridescent blue light. We walked down steps along the water to a little landing, where boats would pull up and pick us up to row us into the cave. At the height of tourist season, it was madness trying to vie for a spot inside the cave.
At one point, another boat cut us off and we were rocked dangerously close to the rocks. But we trusted our rower and he got us in and out safely. All 5 of us did have to fit into one itty-bitty rowboat, though. It was Dad and the girls in the back, all kind of piled on top of each other with Mom lying on top of me in the front. I managed to take a video, but the entire time Mom was yelling at me to lie down so I wouldn’t get decapitated going into the cave. No worries – I made it!
After our cave adventure, we drove to Anacapri, the second town on the island (yes – there are only two), for lunch. We ended the day in Capri, the main (or first) town. We walked through the town and tried the local lemonade made from the biggest lemons I’ve ever seen in my life! They were about as big as our heads – no joke!
We then walked through Augustus’s Garden. Emperor Augustus had his summer home on the island, and his heir, Tiberius, also built a palace there where he ruled in his later years. From the garden, there was a great view of the sea and the rock formation I Faraglioni.
After taking the funicular back down to the beach, we swam around for a couple of hours and then took the ferry back to Sorrento. It was my parent’s wedding anniversary, so that night they had a private dinner at a nearby seafood restaurant and I was in charge of the girls.
I took them to another family-owned restaurant in the fishing village. The waiter must have liked us, because he brought us free bruschetta to start, and then free Limoncello for our after-dinner drinks. All week, the girls had been trying different red and white wines in France and Italy. They hated all of them. So this was their chance to try the local lemon drink. First, they said it smelled like Carrie’s lemon-scented nail polish remover and refused to drink it. When I insisted that I couldn’t finish all three drinks, Carrie tried it and Elizabeth followed. I have no worries that Elizabeth will be peer-pressured into drinking after that experience. She could barely swallow the small sip she took and afterwards said it tasted even worse than the wine, which was also disgusting. So I did end up drinking all three glasses... I didn’t want to offend the waiter!
On Thursday morning we hiked up the steps to the train station to get to Pompeii. Mom, Dad, and I showed Elizabeth and Carrie all the places we’d seen a decade ago (I feel really old when I say a decade ago). And it was just as hot as we remembered ten years ago too! That place just bakes in the heat. There are no trees or shelter anywhere… just an exposed archaeological site. The site is so well preserved because of all the ash that fell on it after Mt. Vesuvius erupted. In the House of Mysteries, a huge farmhouse outside the main city, most of the paintings are still visible on the bedroom walls. When the city was excavated a little over 250 years ago, even the bodies of the victims were found preserved. Casts were made and are randomly found in parts of the city today.
The Temple of Isis
Interior of the House of Mysteries
Forum with Mt. Vesuvius in the background
After spending hours walking around in the heat, it was time to get back to the beach! Dad and Mom had had enough of walking up and down the cliff stairs, so once we walked down from the train station, Dad declared that he would be enjoying the beach next to the hotel and eating at a local restaurant famous for once hosting Sophia Loren. At which point, Elizabeth asked, “Who’s Sophia Loren??”
Elizabeth, Carrie, and I didn’t mind the stairs, though, and we had wanted to try out a different beach with blue floats tied to the deck. We thought we could by-pass walking UP to get back DOWN by either swimming to the other beach (which we soon realized was way too far away) or using a paddle-boat. Earlier in the week we had seen a bunch of kids renting a paddleboat with a waterslide. But when we went to the beach to rent the boat, we were told it had been broken earlier in the day. Stupid kids!
So we walked up to the city, and then back down to the other beach. While we were tanning on the floats, Elizabeth and Carrie noticed another paddle-boat with a slide. But it was already being used, so I went back up to read on the deck and about fifteen minutes later, the girls came running up to me laughing hysterically.
They had swum around the paddleboat for a while waiting for the kids using it to get bored, or trying to work up the courage to ask them if they could try out the slide. The girls never got the courage to ask, but finally the kids did get bored and tied up the boat to a buoy before swimming back to shore. Elizabeth and Carrie decided this was their chance to “borrow” the boat! So they untied it and hopped on, ready to paddle away when a little Italian boy saw them and started yelling. All they could make out was “No! No!” Then the whole gang of kids jumped back into the water and started swimming toward them! Elizabeth and Carrie panicked, jumped off the boat, and swam back to the deck. It’s a good thing the deck was one of those “private beaches” so those little Italian kids couldn’t follow them!
After their botched boat-jacking, Elizabeth and Carrie got bored and hungry and headed back to the hotel. I closed down the beach, staying until dusk when they literally had to kick me out. I met the family for dinner at the Sophia Loren place, where Dad had his really, really fresh seafood meal.
The next morning we caught our flight back to London. The flight home included an 8-hour layover in Milan, so once we got off the flight from Naples, we bought train tickets into the city center. First stop was lunch! We had heard the focaccia in Milan is the best, so Mom and I both ordered a plate. It was ENORMOUS! The plates were the size of large pizza plates and the focaccia still spilled over the side of them! There were a couple of Americans sitting at the table next to us about to order the same thing and when they saw how huge our meals were, they decided to split! Mom was nice enough not to say, “I told you so!”
After lunch, we walked to the Duomo, one of the largest Gothic cathedrals in the world. Everyone except Mom and Dad was dressed in inappropriate summer clothes, so they took a tour inside while we were banished to the square outside.
After they came out, we walked through the Galleria, a beautiful shopping center designed with mosaic floors and a huge metal and glass dome.
We then walked back towards the train station to the Castello Sforzesco, a Renaissance palace that now contains multiple museums. We walked through the courtyards to the Sempione Park. Here we took a break and hung out in the park eating ice cream and playing Phase 10, a great card game introduced to us by Grandma Cocchiarella.
Before we knew it, it was time to get back to the airport to catch our flight home. We loved Italy, and like I said before, especially spending the time together and seeing the sites through the girl’s eyes for the first time.
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