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Ravello is one of the towns along the southern side of the Amalfi coast, only a few miles (but about an hour’s drive) from Positano. It’s higher up in the mountains, which gives it a bit of a different feel from the other towns that we visited. We were totally shocked to discover that: a) there’s a whole network of small towns up there, and b) they’re not entirely inhabited by gnomes or, in fact, any other kind of mythical creatures. We spent the day there walking around the town and then doing a hike along a goat path to some of the even smaller ones nearby. Here are a few pictures of the church there, the view, the local health food store, and some of the nearby vineyards.

And here’s one of the “roads” that we spent a while walking along. Not only was it almost possible to almost touch both sides of the “road” by stretching your arms out, but it was two way and also served as a walkway between towns. Seriously.

And here’s a picture of the local entrant into the creepiness olympics. It’s hard to see, but what we have here is about a liter of some poor guy’s blood in a glass container, which is proudly (and disgustingly) displayed in an altar there. They even have a painting nearby of a woman kneeling beside a recently decapitated body, drying her tears with one hand while collecting a bit of spraying blood in a jar with the other. People are seriously strange.

And finally, here’s a picture of a local “don’t do that” sign, posted in the piazza. If anybody has any idea what the thing in the top middle means, please add a comment. And forget about writing “don’t kick tanks” either. That’s mine.

Paestum, a town just a few miles south of Salerno and Amalfi, is the site of another set of ruins, quite a bit older, and quite a bit less covered by voncanic ash. The town was first part of a Greek colony, then became Roman, then was abandoned because of a little malaria problem at around 600 B.C., and finally was discovered by road builders in the late 1800s, who somehow didn’t let a little 2500 year old city get in the way of progress. Today, there are three massive, impressive, and well preserved temples there, along with enough of the city to feel again like you have some idea what was doing way back when. Here are a handful of pictures from our visit there.

When I was in about the 3rd grade I remember that there was an issue of National Geographic that showed up in our classroom with pictures of Pompeii in it, including a very dramatic picture of one of those frozen-in-time bodies that most people have seen images of on the cover. My previous interest in National Geographic had, somewhat embarrassingly, been almost strictly limited to a search for pictures of scantily clad villagers, but this was another thing entirely. This story had everything a little kid could want… really old historical things, buried treasure, and - most importantly - a massive, exploding volcano. Who could ask for more? I’ve wanted to go ever since, and while we were down in the South, we spent a day there.

Pompeii was entirely covered by the explosion of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79, only 16 years after a huge earthquake had destroyed a good deal of the city. I always thought the explosion was sudden, without warning and covered just about everything, but it turns out that ash and pumice had been raining down on the town for several days before the hammer fell. One lesson to take from Pompeii, then, would be that if you wake up to see your town being rained on by pumice stone, you should immediately go very, very far away, preferably in the opposite direction of the local active volcano. This seems relatively obvious to me, but about 2,000 people (10% of the population) either weren’t all that bright or weren’t capable of leaving and died in the explosion.

I read a good bit about the city before we got there, but there wasn’t much that prepared me for how well preserved it would be. Unless you’ve been to Hurculaneum (in two more posts), there’s probably not much that would. The difference between reading about or seeing pictures of a place like that and actually standing in it, feeling like a part of how these people lived 2000 years ago, is really striking. I seriously doubt that they had a gift shop with little porcelain coliseums on sale back then, but the rest seems straight out of history. I mean, there are paintings on the walls. There is plumbing, there are rooms that look like they could be lived in, kitchens!

The truly amazing thing is that when they began real excavation of the city in the 1700s, they found that the Pompeiians were in many ways more technologically advanced than the people doing the digging. Craziness… damn dark ages! Damn barbarians! Damn lead pipes! We might all be able to fly or something by now if it wasn’t for you!

In any case, here are some pictures that ought to be fairly self-explanatory. The last two are of the most well-preserved temple on the site.

Finally, here are some pictures of the insane human (and one dog) remains that everybody’s been waiting to see. They call them body casts… apparently when they were doing the early excavations they kept finding air pockets that had a pile of bones at the bottom. Eventually they wised up and started pouring plaster into the holes, with the following results.

Technically, this is going to be two slightly compelling facts about Positano, some pictures, and a bunch of blabber, but I’m not going to tell you which ones are the compelling ones here at the beginning in the hope that you’ll keep reading.

It’s completely gorgeous

OK, first off, this place is completely, absolutely stunning. Every time I opened my eyes I was re-stunned, which makes getting around a bit of a challenge, and it really never got old. I felt myself going back into shock just looking at the pictures before I wrote this, but this time I thought ahead and drank a bunch of wine first. I’m always thinking. For example, here’s the view from the villa where we stayed.

Today it’s difficult to understand the motivation to build a town in such a place, where the flattest the land gets is about a 60 degree angle, but I imagine it would have done a number on any invading armies. I guess you could just carry your cauldron of boiling oil up to the top and give it a good push. None of this city walls silliness around here, thanks. Here are some more pictures of the general stunningitude and I’ll have a few more in future posts as well.

Everyone there is a professional stuntperson.

If you have a heart condition, are more than six months pregnant, are afraid of heights, are less than four feet tall, consider yourself a nervous person, feel uncomfortable with confrontation, or are not a certified professional stunt person, do not, under any circumstances go anywhere even remotely near the Amalfi coast. Even if you meet all of those conditions, do not attempt to get behind the wheel of a car unless you are actively seeking a unique method of suicide. Seriously, I drove, and I’ve never seen roads that even came close to this. When I die at 45 my last words will undoubtedly be “Damn you Positano!” Here’s some pictures of the madness.

This first one, which seems like a nice, leisurely one-way road, was in fact a two way road where everybody drives 50 MPH and nobody looks before they pull out in front of you.

Here’s one of a typically nutty bus driver making his way around a corner barely big enough for him to fit through alone at about 40 MPH. The bus drivers would, in lieu of slowing down, honk their horns several times in an informative way before they barreled around corners like this. How thoughtful!

And this one really took the cake. The dog in this picture had just finished going for a ride on the back of the motorcycle in the picture. Seriously. A guy goes out with his little puffball dog, puts it on the back of his motorcycle, and then drives around hairpin turns at incredibly stupid rates of speed. WITH A DOG ON THE BACK! I’ve seen dogs fall over in a car when I went around a soft corner at 20 MPH. They are not known for their balance, dogs, but this one is somehow still alive. Or was a few weeks ago, anyway.

They got themselves some good food.

We had some great meals while we were down there, both at home and at the restaurant. There was a little fruit market that was probably only 100 yards (and 200 stairs) away, and they had some great fresh fruit, citrus, etcetera. The citrus is fantastic, everywhere, and, at $0.75 for a kilo, mindblowingly cheap. It’s the area where Limoncello is made, which prompted me, in a moment of inspiration, to invent the Aubrey-tini. And by inspiration, I mean taking the only three things we had and pouring them into a glass. Didn’t some smart person say that necessity is the mother of invention?

• Three parts fresh orange juice
• One part vodka
• One part limoncello

Just don’t drink too many of them.

Here’s a picture of some of the great food we got at the market.

The beach is beautiful, but don’t look down.

The town itself is sort of in a crease in the mountains, and pinched at the bottom is a small beach. While the water is beautiful itself, the main thing that’s nice about it is the views of the town and the surrounding mountains that you get there. But then we messed up and looked down, only to find the one thing that every stereotype (not to mention common sense) tells us we don’t want to find on the beach. Ewww.

Of course I took a picture. In any case, it didn’t spoil the beach, and we got some great pictures of the town from down there. Here ya go.

We stayed in Positano for a week, with side trips to Pompeii, Paestum, Hurculaneum, and Ravello, all of which I’ll cover in future posts. In other news, last night we bought our tickets for our post-vacation-vacation in Southeast Asia. Three weeks in Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam - I can’t wait!

This will be part I of the “our trip down south” series, which will probably take forever for me to finish, since we had so much fun and took so many darn pictures. I promise it will be fascinating, though - especially if, like most people, you’re fascinated by looking at other people’s vacation pictures. :)

On our way down to Positano, we stopped at a little medieval town called Orvieto, which was quite beautiful. Like a lot of the towns in that area, Orvieto is perched rather precariously on the top of a large cliff and surrounded by some highly serious (and seriously high) city walls. I had a great time being juvenile - as usual - and imagining the cauldrons of boiling oil being prepared at the tops of the walls and the unfortunate people below somehow not seeing it coming. For some reason that I can’t quite explain, I think that boiling oil, in the medieval sense, is really, really funny. In any case, we got into the city just fine but quickly found that the modern fortifications involve roads that are completely nuts and a total lack of street signs. This was my first time driving outside of the US, and cruising around completely lost in a city that looks like it hasn’t changed at all since the 1200s didn’t quite compute. In any case, we finally found our hotel, and even a parking space around the corner with only minor losses to the local population. Here’s a picture of me dreaming of boiling oil and of the surrounding valley from the edge of town.

Once we settled into the hotel, it took us about 15 minutes to figure out why the room was available and relatively cheap…. because there was a clock tower outside that went off every 15 minutes, all night long. Each time it rang once for each hour, and then with a separate bell once for every 15 minutes past the hour. Luckily we were tired from driving, and it wasn’t much of a problem. Here’s a picture of the beautiful/evil thing from our window.

We only had a few hours the next day to visit the town because we needed to get back in the car to head down to Positano, but it worked out just fine because it was quite small. Aside from the general beauty of the town, Orvieto seems to be best known for the huge cathedral there that hangs over the edge of the cliff. There’s a funny story about the building of the thing… apparently a priest came to town and expressed his doubts about transubstantiation to some people there. Later on, he was giving mass when blood started to spontaneously pour out of some part of the church onto a linen cloth. It sounds fishy to me, but the Pope was so excited to hear about it that he ordered them to build a massive church and a shrine for the cloth. Here’s a picture…

In addition to that church, there were a number of other, older ones in town. Here’s a picture of one that was built in the 10th century.

Another interesting thing about Orvieto is that there’s quite a network of caves dug underneath it that has been expanded and used for all sorts of purposes over the years. We toured some of the caves that were used as everything from a bathroom to a grave to a wine cellar that, among other things, made us quite happy not to have had any wine there. There was also an incredibly deep well in the caves, that was apparently put out of service when the water started to taste bad because somebody threw some French people down there. No lie. Here are a final few pictures from around town and of some local Etruscan finds we saw at the museum.