Amalfi

• On the Ship where every one knows your name
• Paris is perfect, if you ditch the men! - France
• An appetite of Venice - Italy
• Party time in Tapas Central - Spain
• Croatia uncovered! - Croatia
• I'll have the state room please - Portugal
• Seeking Spain's hidden gems - Spain
• Let's tryst again - Sicily
• Dallying with Delia - Majorca
• Wax gets the works - Majorca
• B&B at the Palace - Italy
• The Golden Oldie - France
• Amazing Amalfi - Italy
• Follow the Stars - Europe
• Tuscany - Italy

TO BE PERFECTLY FRANK, I hadn’t the foggiest idea where Ravello was when I took off for Naples, picked up a rented car and headed south down the coast. And fog was certainly the last thing I expected.

We drove into the hills through a thick, swirling, zuppa di piselli of a mountain mist. Headlights flickered. From time to time another driver came whacking out of the gloom, overtaking on hairpin bends in an utter white-out.

The bellboy who showed us our room gestured to the blank white window. ‘Just like London’ he said.

Ravello, I discovered the next morning, as obscurity wafted away under the morning sun, is perched high above a famous squiggly bit of the Mediterranean coast. I recognised the general layout from the lurid murals on a restaurant wall in Old Compton Street. So there we are.

It was just like London, but, of course, in reality breathtakingly different.

Rocky escarpments, clothed in terraces of lemon orchards (the lemon trees themselves clothed in black netting, like citrus in mourning), dropped away from our window to the azure sea. Teeny, fanciful villages and pretty little villas clung to the outcrops. They are painted lemon yellow and pink and ochre and look sweet enough to be edible.

Our palazzo, in a little street of palazzos at the very top of the town, on the very top of the mountain, was a gothic wedding cake of a white marble hotel.

There is an unmistakable aura of unflappability that hangs around many busy resorts. In Switzerland, in the Venice Lido, in Paris, the big hotels trade on their echoing stillness beyond the mad rush of ‘out there’. The staff at the Palazzo Sasso were no less charming and solicitous. Perhaps they were used to soothing the nerves. The nerves need soothing.

The Most Beautiful Road in the World

Years ago, perhaps in the fifties, when would-be Hemingways looking like Jude Law parked their yachts in the cove and binged on village rusticity, there might have been a quiet, reserved, remote charm. But that would have been before they built the coast road, before, perhaps, ‘oor’ Gracie Fields fancied a bit of posh ‘oops’ Capri way, ‘appen.

Before the ragazzi laden with gold jewellery and leathery, saggy, brown bodies sloped into town, before the place became famous.

We drove down into Almalfi. And hooted, twisted, kangaroo-jumped, stalled and inched our way through it. There was a sudden glimpse of narrow streets and awnings to our right, and just as suddenly we were leaving and corkscrewing out of the other side.

There was nowhere to park our car but paradoxically it was impossible to get there by any other means, except possibly tourist coach. Had I shown the foresight to hire a bus I might have had more luck.

Nothing really makes life difficult for a place like a reputation for quaintness. So, ‘the most beautiful road in the world’ is a permanent traffic gridlock from end to end.

Don’t think for a moment you can avoid this road. One of the disadvantages of many scenic routes is that building them is such a labour that it precludes side roads, turnings, b-roads or alternative routes. Just like everybody else, you go lurching, revving, haltingly, straight through.

In Positano there is a tiny track down through the holiday villas that have engulfed the ancient village and encrusted the cliffside. In a panic of trepidation at being sucked in and spat out the other end I turned into what was almost the first available temporary parking lot and went the next half a mile by stone stair, to discover what? What is the experience that these crowds, even this early in the year, seek so avidly? The tiny beach? The endless shops, where so my guidebook informed me, the cognoscenti of Rome come for the latest fashions before they hit Rome? If Rome this year is wearing international seaside tourist tat, I’ll eat my wispy straw hat.

Promise of Lost Grandeur

Is it the church, marooned in the throng of coach parties? Or what appeared to be the world’s oldest multi-storey car park cunningly inserted into a cleft in the rock? (Damn! And I’m parked halfway up the cliff.)

What is the joy of proximity to your fellow tourist? Is there some special day or season (we were there early enough in the year) when claustrophobia sulla Mare suddenly returns to its lowly origin? When a local child bounces a ball down a flight of steps and old fishermen put aside their parking duties to crochet net shawls and mend linen hot pants?

So back to the bliss, bliss and treble bliss of the hotel. Let me tell you about our supper. A slice of carpaccio and a smattering of salad, puck-sized pizza, a single herby gnocchi and a mollet egg with ham (as amuse-guele) each. This was followed by a bowl of fish soup, which was extra to the menu as well. Then the meal started.

Cosseted, we drew Ravello close around ourselves to protect us from the pirates on the shore below, much like the original medieval settlers before us must have done. Ravello is a town of steps. Take the flights, walk the walks. If at first the place seems small, huddled up around its central square, where the dogs lounge hopefully outside the butchers and the locals gather in the early evening - like an Escher puzzle, its gets bigger as you dive down staircases, between high walls and peer through gaps in faded doors at half-glimpsed secret gardens and faded palaces. Or suddenly spot, way below, a cat creeping across a rickety pergola hung with weeds.

It manages, against the odds, to preserve its promise of lost grandeur, as if it once was richer and more fashionable than now.

There are two famous gardens to visit. ‘I have found the magic garden of Klingor,’ announced Richard Wagner. He must have had the same trouble as the rest of us. The Villa Rufolo is hidden down a mysterious alley of agapanthus and through a grim and brooding gatehouse. But more likely, the gloomy castle struck his imaginative brain as the ideal setting for one of his more excitable opera highlights.

All View

The view was cracking, but then Ravello is all view.

Don’t give up the longer tramp to the Villa Cimbrone. It was built by some dispossessed Yorkshire millionaire (he probably ran away to escape from Gracie Fields). The garden is laid out around a broad path, all dark trees and twisty box-edged paths, and then suddenly and frighteningly you teeter out on to a stone belvedere, hanging out over the terraced cliff.

My wife got a peculiar feeling in her stomach looking over the edge but you should brave it to see the neatly ordered terraces and vineyards and the road twisting in and out of view down to the sea, way below.

Crossing back over the mountains, with the fog long gone, we passed herds of goats and ruined farmhouses, marvelling at how the magnetic tat of the coastline so quickly falls away.

We were on our way to the ruins of Pompeii, to marvel at the lost Italian arts of pavements and town planning. Go there quickly. Apparently, raiding troops of school parties are dismantling it quicker than any torrent of lava.

We came back, taking in Sorrento, for a faded twinset and pearls view of Italian holiday life, and avoided ‘on good advice’ going into Naples. The advice turned out to be wrong.

Our return flight on the Sunday was delayed, so British Airways put us in a waterfront hotel for a few hours and we walked along the promenade at dusk alongside the rest of the population, strolling, chatting, arm in arm; feasting on the balmy air and the grandeur of a faded, geriatric city. Not quaint, not cosy, not touristy and wholly fascinating. I vowed to return. See Naples and live!

But take the Amalfi Coast with care.