When Pete walked from our flat in Rome to the train station to pick up the car we’d hired, he studied every street, memorised their names, noted if they were one way, if you were allowed to turn left or not. He mapped out the route in his mind that he was going to take, going over and over it. Jack and Noah went with him, for company and for distraction. They talked all the way but Pete couldn’t remember a word they said.

When they got back to the flat Jack and Noah were laughing.

‘That, was so embarrassing mum,’ Noah said.

I looked over at Pete, ‘Did you go OK?’

‘Yeah, fine.’

‘Except for the red light,’ Jack said still laughing. ‘How were they dad? All of them beeping and yelling out their window.’

‘What happened?’ I asked Pete, pulling one of the wheelie bags I’d just finished rolling clothes into up onto its end.

‘I stopped at a red light, waiting to turn left and as luck would have it I was the first bunny in the line. The guy behind beeped and I thought,
‘Yeah, alright, what do you want me to do, go straight through it?” Turns out that was exactly what he wanted me to do. It was only a few seconds before everyone else was beeping and then the yelling out the window started. These two,’ Pete said pointing at Jack and Noah, ‘joined in, “just go dad, you have to go.” So I gave up.’

‘And?’

‘And then they all followed, as if was the most normal thing in the world to go through a red light. Guess it is in Italy. There must be some rule I don’t know about or there was some sign written in Italian that I missed the point of. Anyway we made it, hardest part done.’

I’d been worried that a nine seater van was going to be too big for Italy’s roads, had thought maybe we should get something smaller, but by the time we had all the kids in, plus our eight months worth of luggage, I realised that if we’d got anything smaller we would have had to strap a couple of kids to the roof.

Pete turned the key in the ignition and called back to the kids, ‘Everyone right? Got your seatbelts on?’ A big yep came up from the back of the van.

‘Am I right that way?’ He asked me.

I looked both ways totally disorientated as to which way I should be looking. Finally I figured it out and said, ‘Yep,’ and added, ‘mum always said you have to remember to keep yourself in the middle of the road.’

Pete looked at me with a death stare and said very slowly, ‘I just drove myself out of Rome.’

‘Right,’ I said looking straight ahead.

Pete reached down into the door pocket beside him and handed me a map the size of an encyclopaedia. ‘Find Cassalina, we need to follow it all the way out of here.’

OK, good. A known fact – I’m not good with maps, my sense of direction is even worse than my ability with maps. One of the first arguments Pete and I ever had was over me giving directions. It was dark, we were in Mossman somewhere, late for a party when Pete handed me a map. Needless to say we arrived at the party hours later, me with red eyes, Pete looking like he might strangle the guy who was asking him if he wanted a drink.

It was only ten minutes into the drive before I’d given the wrong directions and we were heading west instead of south. The argument that I knew was going to come when Pete handed me the street directory had started, but the problem was solved quickly, Pete decided that any time there was a question as to which way we should go he would pull over and look at the map himself.

We were heading to Amalfi, a town I’d heard a lot about over the years. It was somewhere I’d been keen to visit, but because of how far south it was I hadn’t been sure if we’d be able to fit it into our schedule. I’d also had concerns about the crowds that are meant to swarm the place, though had heard they were nowhere near as bad in winter. There was also the fact that the road in was notorious for its cliff top hairpin bends. In the end though we had decided to go, we wanted to take the kids to Pompeii, Amalfi was close enough to Pompeii to allow us to drive there for a day visit.

The drive from Rome south, once we realised we had to stay on the autostrada, was easy, as long as we remembered to stay in the right lane when we weren’t overtaking.

The city of Rome has 2.6 million people living in it. Italy itself has 57.8 million. As we drove down the autostrada the density of the country’s population became obvious, Naples spread out on either side of the autostrada covering the valley and reaching up into the hills, then on the other side of the city it reached down to the ports which jutted into the Mediterranean Sea. We drove for what must have been twenty minutes without seeing a vacant centimetre of land. The landscape was crammed with industrial buildings, housing and tall blocks of flats with washing flapping out their windows. My mind reeled at the number of people, at the propensity of the human race to populate and dominate a landscape.

The drive into Amalfi was as torturous as all the stories I’d heard and lived up to its reputation scrawled in the travel books. I spent my time holding onto handle bar above my head, my knuckles white, my right foot pushed flat to the floor on an imaginary brake. I tried not to say, ‘Look out! Shit!’ or ‘Fuck!’ too often. But instead offered Pete constructive advice like, ‘You’re very close to the edge on this side, one foot, half a foot, ten centimetres,’ and then occasionally a ‘Shit!’ Would slip out as the car coming the other way squeezed past us.

Pete and I have often argued over the years about who’s the better driver, with me saying I’m definitely more cautious, more precise. But the Amalfi driving has humbled me, two months later I’m still in awe of the way Pete drove a nine seater van on the wrong side of the road around cliff top bends, so tight you would be lucky to push a shopping trolley around them. We met buses coming the other way; I doubt you would have been able to squeeze a breath between the bus and our car. Cars overtook us on the blindest of blind corners and others sat stuck on our rear bumper. The scariest and most amusing part though were the paedestrians. I could understand why you’d want to walk along the road, there was no footpath and the view was almost worth dying for, but nothings quiet that good is it? The most amazing were the young women who blissfully pushed prams towards us, looking down at the sea way below, apparently unaware that we were having to squeeze past them and their babies while we tried not to scrape up against a car coming the other way.

In between closing my eyes and holding my breath I did look out over the cliffs we were driving along, at the houses perched on rock faces, wondering at the impossibility of lugging materials to such a place and then putting them together to make a house that wouldn’t slip into the sea. It wasn’t just the houses, there were elaborate churches built on top of rocks that jutted out into the sea and structures that looked like castles from long ago. Where there weren’t buildings there were vertical orchards of orange trees and mandarins and in between those vertical vineyards.

The coastline itself was dramatic, cliffs of jagged rocks plunging into what looked like a pristine sea, glittering and shimmering blues and greens. The jagged cliffs occasionally opened up into sheltered beaches where you could imagine lying on an air mattress in summer floating in the sea.

When we finally arrived at Amalfi I couldn’t get out of the car at first, my jelly legs wouldn’t hold me. Pete and the kids thought were fine, they walked down to the sea while I waited in the car for a Mr Franco to come and meet us and show us where we were staying.

Mr Franco, when he arrived was a shy Italian guy somewhere in his late to mid thirties. He spoke broken English and kept referring to Miss Beatrice who owned the place where we were going to stay, all of his instructions obviously coming from this woman. He gave us a pass which would allow us to drive into the town and told us it was important we didn’t loose it, he said if we did we wouldn’t be allowed to drive our car in. Then he went and got in his car and we followed him in ours.

I asked Pete what he thought all the ‘Mr Franco’ and ‘Miss Beatrice’ stuff was about.

‘Feminism’s infiltrated the mob,’ he said, ‘Miss Beatrice is the new leader, the godmother.’

There was a person who looked like a policeman standing at the archway entry to the town. Mr Franco pulled over and talked to him, he pointed back at us, talked some more and then we were waved through.

There were people walking everywhere in the cobble stone piazza that opened up in front of us, we slowed to about five, ten kilometres an hour. On the right of the piazza was a church set high up above the town wide steps leading up to it. The church wasn’t dull in colour like the ones in Rome; it had been painted in almost a mosaic style, the colourfulness of the steeple stood out from the rock face behind it.

This was what I’d imagined Italy would be like, century old communities not much changed from the way they once were. From where we stopped to let the traffic come down the narrow one way street of the village we could see shops with boxes of fresh fruit, there were fish mongers with fresh fish and squid lined up in ice and what I can only describe as a butcher - but I’m sure there must be a better name - with fresh cuts of meat hanging on big silver hooks and big slabs in behind glass resting on ice. There were steep narrow pathways with stone steps that twisted up from the road, doorways to houses sat right on the path.

It was the first time since arriving in Italy that I’d felt a sense of young and old, not just people Pete and my age, like it had seemed to be in Rome. There were children, Jack and Noah’s age, wandering the streets, laughing, and there were old people. Old women with their grey hair often dressed in black, pulling nanna trolleys full of food up the cobbled street. And there a couple of small groups of old men gathered together, talking, smoking cigarettes.

Parking space in the village was limited so we had to park at a garage a good, two, three hundred meters from where the house was that we were staying in. The house was perfect for us, much bigger than where we’d stayed in Rome. The ceilings in each room were in the shape of a dome. They were painted white, when you looked up they seemed to disappear into a soft nothing. There was a spa bath and big wide shutters that opened out onto a view of the village. Pete and my bedroom window looked straight across at a huge cliff with tiny houses gripping the face of it, down below was the narrow street that wound through the village.

It wasn’t hard to feel comfortable, wasn’t hard to settle in. I was in fact tempted to stay in the small village for our whole three days and not go anywhere. The whole purpose of coming south though had been to go to Pompeii, and we had promised the kids dead people. I thought Pete might want to have a quiet day the next day, have a rest from driving the cliff top road, but he said it was better to get back out there while all the hairpin bends were still fresh in his mind.

So the next morning we got up early and braved the road in a fine mist of rain. Already the tight bends and narrow passes were loosing their impact, I was starting to laugh instead of swear every time there was a close call and Noah had lost his fear of falling over the edge enough to be able to play corners in the back seat of the van.

I’m proud to say that we found our way to Pompeii without once getting lost. I might not be very good with a map but I was becoming very good at finding obscure signs. We did though get conned into stopping before we reached the public car park and ended up having to pay for a days parking.

Pompeii was a maze of stones. Large smooth stones that made up roads wide enough to fit a horse and cart, stones stacked up on top of each other to make walls that were once part of elaborate houses with intricate mosaics, large foyers with sculptures and colourful paintings. There were the tiny houses too, squashed together in what once must have been the slum end of town. There were water fountains with sculptures at nearly every corner where the Pompeiians would have gone with their ceramic jugs to cart home water.

We visited the grand amphitheatres and the ancient parliament house and saw where gods were worshipped with Mt Vesuvius framed in the background.

The kids weren’t as impressed or as interested as I thought they would be. Jack particularly had lost the need to listen and to know and was more interested in running and hiding, seeing who he could make jump the most when he leapt out in front of them. They were disappointed that there wasn’t many dead people. They’d thought, like I had, that there would be stone dead people in the street, caught by the larva going about their daily business, framed for eternity. We looked and looked but the only dead people were behind wire, lying on shelves in a shed. I think we saw two, maybe three, grim stone figures with their hands up over their faces, and there was a dog too, caught licking itself by the larva.

After Pompeii we drove up Mt Vesuvius. There were old run down hotels on the side of the road, often with graffiti and wooden barricades across their driveway, looking like they hadn’t been used for years. The houses we drove past had full green rubbish bags stacked up out the front of them. I don’t mean two or three bags, but rather enough to half fill a rubbish truck. I thought there must have been a long ongoing garbage strike, but apparently in Italy there’s no more room for rubbish, they’ve filled up their landfill, so in Mt Vesuvius the rubbish is piled up on the street in the spot where the garbos used to come and pick it up from.

The kids jogged up the mountain while I staggered with the cold air and high altitude, my asthma taking on a vengeance that I hadn’t experienced since I was a little girl. Carefully I took one slow step at a time imagining the headlines back home, ‘Australian woman dies on the face of Vesuvius.’

The smell of sulphur, wafts of steam rising from the crater and view of both Pompeii and Naples made risking my life worth it. The kids were thrilled to be standing on the top of a volcano and it gave them a whole new understanding of how Pompeii had come to its end.

We spent the next day in Amalfi wandering, enjoying the fact that we didn’t have to drive. The town itself seemed to be getting ready for a festival of some sort. There was a band rehearsing behind closed doors, somewhere near where our car was parked. And loud bangs were constantly going off in the street. I jumped every time I heard one, at first thinking it was a gunshot, then rationalising it to a car back firing even though there was no car around. No one else in the street flinched, the loud bangs seemed to be part of everyday life in Amalfi.

Jack and Noah solved the mystery when they saw some kids with crackers, lighting them and then throwing them on the ground.

On our last night in Amalfi I slept well until two in the morning, but them I was woken by another loud noise. At first I thought it was the same bangs I’d heard in the street earlier, but then the noise cracked through the air again, much louder than any of the bangs that had made me jump in the street. I listened to a few more and then fear started to set in, I reached out and grabbed Pete’s arm, not realising that he was awake too.

‘It’s OK,’ Pete said, as the next crack split the air. It was so loud that I was convinced one of the cliffs above us must have been tumbling down.

‘What is it?’

‘Thunder.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah, it’s thunder.’

‘I’ve never heard such loud thunder. I thought there was an earth quake and one of the cliffs was coming down.’

‘Yeah I did at first too, it’s taken me a while to figure out.’

As we laid there listening to the thunder explode around us we decided that the cliffs must make the thunder louder. It was probably an hour before we got back to sleep and then it seemed no sooner had I closed my eyes than there was another noise waking me up, it was still dark outside. This time though it was music. It sounded like flutes or a clarinet, moving down the street. I grabbed my watch from beside my bed and went into the bathroom to see what the time it was. It was six-o-clock. I pulled on a jumper and went over to the long wooden shutters and opened them. With the light from the streetlight I could see three men walking slowly down the street. They had broad brimmed black hats on, black capes wrapped around their shoulders that fell to the ground and all of them were playing some sort of wind instrument.

The kids and Pete were awake by the time the band we’d heard rehearsing the day before started walking down the street. We went to the window and watched as the full brass band, all men, passed in the street below.

Packing up we heard a constant stream of people going past the house below on the street. By the time we were in our car and driving out of the village the main street was packed. Our big van crept along with no one in a hurry to get out of our way; it was like driving through a flock of sheep on a dirt road in outback Australia. Slowly everyone parted for us and then they closed behind us as if we’d never been there. When we finally reached the piazza we saw the band again on the church steps. There were balloons and popcorn being sold and small rides had been set up for kids. A celebration of some sort was happening, something to do with the church, there were lots of people crossing themselves and kissing their fingers.

On the road out of Amalfi this time we were full of confidence, laughing at all the close calls. I was relaxed enough to be snapping away with the camera out the window. There was an old couple in a campervan coming the other way. The guy driving gave us a great-full wave when we stopped to let him squeeze past. I couldn’t help thinking that the worry on his face must have been what I looked like when we’d driven in the first time. He was probably right to worry though, his campervan made our van look tiny. I went back to snapping photos out the window, happy to leave the driving up to Pete.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Switzerland Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.