Italy: Journey from Agerola to Amalfi
We just got back from a day of exploring Amalfi and I can firmly say that it was just as incredible as I had imagined. I set my alarm last night for 9:30AM but woke up long before my alarm went off. We’re staying in Agerola, which is set at an incredibly high elevation with a cool mist that encapsulates the town. The cloudy mist was visibly dissipating throughout the area as we journeyed toward the SITA bus stop to catch our 11AM ride to the town of Amalfi.
Amalfi isn’t that far from Agerola, but the bus ride took nearly an hour for us to get in to town. The roads wind drastically down the hillside, weaving in and out. How the bus drivers do it, I’ll never know; the roads are big enough for a single car, yet buses meander their way around like pros, honk-honking their way down the hillside so oncoming traffic is prepped.
I was actually excited for the long ride. While the views are pretty from Agerola and from Amalfi, the ride down provides for striking views of the cliff sides and the idyllic houses scattered about. I had seen pictures of the hillside, like I’m sure many of you have, but nothing really prepared me for the stunning quality of our surroundings. The morning mist that laid over the mountains made everything all the more surreal.
We arrived in Amalfi around noon and began to explore the town on foot. We took a short walk near the pier to check out the small stretches of beach and the views from the ground before we indulged in some mid-day gelato (as per usual, limoncello for me and chocolate for Staci).
Perfection.
After our mid-day snack, we stumbled upon the actual town of Amalfi. The streets were strewn with jewelers, markets, all things lemon (the fruit for which Amalfi is famed), gelateries, restaurants, cafes; a tourist’s heaven. We grabbed a few postcards and a couple of gifts and ventured to the local post office to mail things out.
One thing is for certain: Amalfi is famous for it’s lemons for a reason. As we walked down the streets, we noticed that all of the souvenirs displayed the bright yellow fruit ever so proudly. I had heard that Amalfi’s lemons were larger than our typical grocery store lemons, but I wasn’t sure how big they were.
They’re big. Incredibly so. Some of the lemons we saw were bigger than the biggest grapefruits I have seen in local grocery stores.
After shopping and admiring the town, we headed back to the bus stop in the late afternoon and jumped on the 5PM bus back to Agerola. The bus ride was seemingly longer this time with the mid-day heat and the masses of people (and annoying children), but we made it… and treated ourselves to a mid-day gelato upon our return, naturally.
Salvatore, the son of the owner of our B&B (Nido degli Dei) talked with us during our breakfast and invited us out to dinner in Bomerano for the evening. We headed to a little Italian place and enjoyed dinner with him and his friend, Roberto, and got to see how Italians really do dinner. A few things of mention on how Americans and Italians differ in their eating habits: a) they eat dinner late, much like the Spaniards. We didn’t head out until about 8:30P and didn’t start eating dinner until 10PM; b) dinner is a production. It’s a multi-course meal with loads of vino that’s a slow-moving, enjoyable process vs. the fast food nation that we see in the US. We didn’t end up getting home until around midnight but it was an interesting and authentic adventure.
Up for tomorrow: Sentiero Degli Dei, ‘The walk of the gods,’ that will take us about 5km from Bomerano to Positano. Stay tuned!
Love from Agerola,
