It is 6am. I just banged my shin on the end of the bed searching for my socks and I’m cursing this decision to be spontaneous. Who travels 4 hours to Valencia to watch the Formula 1 without tickets on the biggest race day this side of Michael Schumacher’s lsat win? The Tate’s do.
Positano is not hard to miss. It’s a beacon of white on a anorexically narrow two lane road and the bus makes a grand show every time it passes the lone stop, but somehow, I missed it. Shirin was car sick, her head in her lap. The Aussie in the crowded stairwell was chatting away about his bus trip around Europe and I was doing my best to follow all points while standing on some of the scariest roads in the world and yes I missed our stop. It was our first full day on the Amalfi Coast and I was a little overwhelmed at the sudden shift that occurs when you are in a new place. Usually I take the first few hours to familiarize myself with the map and the tourist book so nothing is surprising and I’m prepared for anything but this… missing the lone stop to Positano… this was my worst bungle of the entire trip and it was a doozy because the bus doesn’t stop for another 1 1/2 hours until it reaches Sorrento on the other side of the peninsular.
Positano is a dream. It’s as if someone built the sweetest village in the world then poured it like dripping ice down the side of a mountain to the beach below. A single road leads in and another leads out, keeping the one way traffic to a slow crawl while the locals and tourists stroll by.
The night train from Taormina pulled into Napoli Termini around 7am. Anyone awake at this hour was most likely still awake from the night before or a homeless stray, making for a very zombie like walk across the tiled station. Napoli is known as a bustling energetic and filthy city however clearly these reviews weren’t written during the morning hours in the vacation month of August.
Taormina is Italy and Italy is Taormina. It’s where the mountain meets the sea, where the old meets the new. It’s character lies in the narrow terrace lined with geraniums and the paint peeling from the exposed stone wall. It’s the couple speeding by on their scooter, the young mother and her precocious child, head tight with curls and the toothless grandmother. It is cigarrettes and conversation, wine and cheese, bathing and preening and eating and shopping and promenading. It is all of these things and then… it is nothing. Taormina is because Taormina is. There is no industry but the ceramics sold to tourists, no commerce but the restaurants and clothes stores and cafes, gilded fly traps for the wandering cruise guest. I try to spot the "locals", and wonder if this place disappears in the mist come nightfall. It is my dream made real.