... then the hotel. Actually both were quite nice. The hotel is an old villa, furnished with lots of fake (and maybe a couple of real) antiques:
... statues on the front lawn, good views:
Having delivered Isabella to her workshop, Fabrizio took us to Ravello. It is very near the coast but a little higher up in the mountains. This is the standard postcard view of Ravello:
We started with the cathedral. The number of columns on the pulpit stubbornly refused to match the description...
Finally, Fabrizio discovered that he was reading about the wrong cathedral... Anyway, this one has on display San Bartolomeo's blood, which miraculously liquefies every year on July 27th! It also has pretty funny old mosaics. Goodbye, Jonah...
Hello, Jonah...
On to Villa Rufolo, built in the 13th century and then modified and remodeled many times, so it has a little bit of everything:
We all had a good time, especially Fabrizio, with his wife away:
At lunch time we went to fetch Isabella, but took wrong turns several times. When you ask for directions, people say "sempre dritto", even though there is not a single straight road in that area. "Sempre dritto" quickly became a private joke. So we arrived late and everyone was hungry, and the restaurants were closed. We looked for the recommended "La Terrazza" for a while ("sempre dritto"), but it was closed too. Finally, Fabrizio got distracted and took a wrong turn, so we ended up on the autostrada heading towards Salerno. This caused a quick "recalculation" of the route and plans -- by Isabella: their GPS stayed at home with the kids. She called the Dal Pescatore restaurant in Vietri sul Mare (on Amalfi Coast), which she knew from some scientific gathering, and we went there. The waiter actually remembered Isabella and Fabrizio. We ended up having a good, late, slow lunch of seafood and pasta.
M wanted to buy ceramics for a while, and Vietri turned out to be just the place, with a huge factory / show room. Some people sort of liked the place...
... others less.
But it made someone really happy:
When we finally left for Casale Antonietta, our Bed and Breakfast near Sorrento that Isabella had booked for us, it was already quite late, and there was a lot of traffic. We arrived around 10:30 and discovered that the final stretch of the route to our B&B was an alley the width of a car plus six inches on each side, with a stone wall on one side and barbed wire on the other, and with nasty turns. Fabrizio and Isabella didn't like that one bit -- they have a brand new Japanese car. What if someone comes from the opposite direction? Anyway, we made it up safely. A friendly Polish guy who works there put us in a tiny two-bedroom cottage -- a far cry from Villa Soglia.
Not a chance to go out that evening again, of course, but we had had a late lunch and we had some fruit with us.
A long day!
The next morning the weather improved, we discovered a lemon orchard on the property...
and good views of Vesuvio...
So the mood improved, even though Fabrizio kept grumbling about the cheap place and the narrow alley.
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