Sorrento and the Amalfi Coast

Okay, so I am running a bit behind in updating. My last post was Testaccio, Rome and right now we are somewhere off the coast of Greece en route to Piraeus. I blame it on the ship bandwidth - when at sea, I am competing with roughly 700 undergraduate students who were born with an iPhone in their hands, so uploading to the Internet requires bucket loads of patience. 

800 people live on this active volcano.

On day 2 of our cruise south from Naples, our ship made a close pass on Stromboil, an active (and inhabited!) volcano off the coast of Sicily. It was puffing clouds of steam and ash every few minutes... close your eyes and imagine a volcano island, and this is it. Elon Musk, we've found your secret lair...

Stromboli Volcano from World Odyssey deck, Adriatic Sea

Marina Piccola, Sorrento, Italy

Breakfast, Marina Piccola 73, Sorrento

On Sept. 20, we caught a fast train from Rome to Napoli (Naples). From there, it was an hour on the Circumvesuvio (literally, "around Vesuvius") train past Herculaneum and Pompeii to Sorrento, on the north side of the Amafli peninsula. Sorrento makes a good base for excursions to the famous excavations at Pompeii and the ridiculously picturesque towns hugging the Amalfi Coast. Sorrento itself is one big limoncello shop, touristy to the extreme. Thankfully, our hotel was an oasis from the crass commercialism... Marina Piccola 73, hidden away at the base of the cliff below Sorrnto proper and fronting the small port where ferries whisk throngs of visitors to their dream destinations: Amalfi, Capri, Positano, Salerno, Ischia.

Our initial plan for an Amalfi day trip involved renting a two-person scooter and doing the famous cliff hugging drive from Sorrento ourselves. What could possibly go wrong? We'd driven scooters in Italian rush hour, so we felt we could handle a twisty-turny, low-speed road. Thank God the rental agency required a driver's license, which my husband had left on the ship. This turned out to be a godsend. 

Yours truly, with El Jeffe del Norte

Less than a minute into the "fun" part of the Sorrento-Amalfi bus ride (the part that hugs the sheer cliff on the south side of the penninsula), we knew we had narrowly averted disaster by being denied a scooter rental. We had a comedian at the wheel who loved scaring everyone on the bus by pretending to lose control at hairpin turns 1,000 feet above the ocean, yelling "OH MY GOOOOODDD!" in his thick Italian accent. Anyway, we made it and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. 

Amalfi is stunning, and steep... Lots of narrow, winding alleyways, and although there were lots of tourist shops, they did a better job of blending in. We had our first ocean swim of the trip here on Amalfi's public beach. located to the far east of the main drag. No sand here, all rocks, but the water is clear, inviting, and warm, perfect for a dip after lunch.