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.

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.

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!

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.

One thing I had only a vague idea about but that everybody else seems to see as the highlight of Venice is the pigeons. There are A LOT of pigeons in general, but the piazza at St. Mark’s really takes it to a new level. And for some reason, when confronted with such a sea of pigeons, at least 75% of the tourists just completely lose their minds. I can’t think of another way to explain the sudden, uncontrollable desire to have giant rats with wings land on you, which is what everybody does. Here’s a picture of a woman who is probably sane in other circumstances covered in the things, along with one of the crazy people who sell pigeon food all day in the square to enable this insanity.

Another thing I didn’t know was that St. Mark’s is so named because the remains of the man himself are kept there. I also didn’t know who St. Mark was, but hey. In any case, St. Mark was one of the four evangelists (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), who seem to be the upper echelon of saint-dom, at least here in Italy. In the early days of the Venetian republic, some local merchants went to Alexandria, appropriated Mr. Mark’s remains, and brought them back here, where he became the city’s new patron saint. Venice already had a patron saint at the time - Theodore - but he was pushed aside in favor of the new one. Theodore is supposed to have killed a dragon, which is pretty cool by me, but I guess they liked Mark better. The evangelists each have a symbol (Eagle, Ox, Human, and Lion - Mark), so the lion became the symbol of the city, and today there are lion decorations on all manner of things. A funny side note here is the Venetian justification for the theft… Mark was supposed to have passed by the lagoon in a boat and had a vision that he would be laid to rest there. The funny part is that Venice didn’t even exist at the time. Sounds fishy to me. Anyway, here’s a picture of the man himself and an (admittedly bad) one of a mural on the facade of the church that depicts the body arriving there, and is also the oldest known image of what it looked like.

Another thing I didn’t know about Venice was that most of the things here were stolen (ok, plundered) from other places. The facade of the church itself looks a bit like a patchwork because it was used as a gallery of loot for a few hundred years. There are also some really impressive sculptures of horses, called the Triumphal Quadriga, in the upstairs of the church that were taken from Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade when Venice laid a smack down on that city. Here are some pictures of the facade and the horsies.

And to wrap things up, here are some pictures of the interior of the church (yeah, it’s about solid gold), the Piazza and Piazzetta from the balcony, and of course the obligatory creepy shriveled hand relic thing. I can’t help myself, I’m sorry.

Is this guy a cheeseball, or what? This was on the door of a beauty salon here in Venice, and it continues my confusion as to why they only seem to be able to put pictures of people with ridiculous hair styles on these places. This young fellow has got himself a ‘Soccer Mullet,’ which is hilarious for more reasons than I have time to recount here.

I thought it was funny when people started making fun of rednecks for their mullets back in the 90s. It was funnier still when all of the hipsters in Brooklyn showed up with their irony-laden mullets. And now we have the European, irony-free, soccer mullet, as if it were some statement of athleticism or something. Doesn’t everybody know that only works for hockey players?

I haven’t done this in a little while, and it’s about time to get back on top of it. I’m just realizing that it’s been so long since I wrote something on here that there are things that I’ve forgotten most of the details of already. Oy! I’m going to try to write up about an article-a-day for a little while, at least until I get caught up.

Quick, name three beers from Italy…

I got you, didn’t I? Maybe you came up with Peroni, or Moretti if you’re really good. And why have we not heard of the fantastic beers that just have to be pouring out of this country and into our living rooms? It’s because they don’t really drink beer in Italy, that’s why. Why would anyone other than an uncultured swine (i.e. me) want to drink beer in a place where wine is cheaper than bottled water? I don’t know, but I haven’t given up yet, and that’s why I bought this beer today. That, and the fact that its name exactly describes my feelings about the beer here… slightly better than eternal damnation, but a bit worse than not very good.

On another beer-related note, Hannah and I were planning a trip to Belgium for some bar hopping over her Spring break when we discovered that renting a villa on the Amalfi Coast for a week was $500 cheaper than slumming it in the cheapest hotel in Brussels. So, I guess I’ll suffer through more wine. Life is not hard here.

And just for fun, here’s a picture of the Hell Bier with his friend Mr. Dunkel, which I’ve taken to calling Skunkel… but I drink it anyway.