Escape to Italy

It's been awhile since the last post, and I've got a great excuse: we've been traveling! Well, we got back 6 days ago, but I wanted to get the pictures sifted through and captioned before writing.

We spent 6 nights / 5 days in Italy. On Tuesday 30 Oct, we flew down to Naples, and managed to find ourselves dinner at the most historic + popular pizzeria (da Michele) right before closing time. We were the last ones in the place and we couldn't finish our beers and margherita pizzas fast enough. This set the tone for the trip, as we were the last or second to last party at every lunch and dinner we had, save one. It also set the precedent for pizza for the rest of the trip, a bar too high for anyone else to pass. After all, this is the Pat's Steaks of Neapolitan pizza, and Naples is the birthplace of the food itself.

We spent our first day exploring Naples -- a very gritty, "working" city where no one seems to actually be working. Then we made our way to Sorrento where we spent 5 nights. The overall assessment on Sorrento is that as a town it's too touristy, full of Brits and Americans, and given the time of year they were on the whole "seniors", as most parents & kids are back to school. During this trip, I learned to appreciate the "obnoxious American" tourist as in practice less obnoxious than the "obnoxious British" tourist. In a heartwarming way, the Americans are doing their best to take in the local culture (and a bit too hard to make friends along the way), while, as Jason observes, the Brits are just looking for a place that they can pretend is Britain with sunshine.

Sorrento, while not as charming as might be hoped, was a great home base for our many day trips, which included hiking up + down miles of hills and staircases through and between tiny towns, a visit to Pompeii, two picnic lunches, a handful of passing showers, and several bus rides back and forth on the peninsula. These gravity-defying trips along rocky cliffs with dubious guardrails area tourist attraction unto themselves, causing Jason to label one driver's performance "the most impressive thing [he's] seen in a long time]."

The wine was good -- mostly. We drank house wine at nearly every meal, and it varied greatly in quality, to the point that our juicebox wine outperformed some of the restaurant wines. The food, though, never failed to delight. We ate pasta, seafood, stuffed peppers, antipasti, and of course pizza, each of which was delicious even if it didn't quite live up to the standards set on day 1. We even managed to eat a fair amount of the tripe we were served at a little family trattoria that served you whatever they felt like serving you.

All in all... a great escape. Unfortunately it feels like it was months ago at this point, after a tough week back at work for both of us. However, the pictures bring it back, and you should make a point to check these out because there are some amazing shots here. Here are a few to entice you...

A view of Capri from Termini

Looking back on Positano from somewhere between Nocelle + Montepertuso

Mt. Vesuvius overlooking the ruins of Pompeii