Amalfi

For my final full day in Amalfi I decided to do another nature hike, this time to the Torre della Ziro, an ancient fortified tower that stands on a ridge high above the town. I consulted my map and concluded that I should be able to knock if off in 90 minutes.

I don’t know how, given that I’ve been here nearly a week, but somehow I forgot that in Amalfi something can only be a few hundred metres away as the crow flies, but still require hours to reach, thanks to a little thing called elevation. Walking to Torre della Ziro meant walking first to Pontone, a tiny village that under normal circumstances would have been an outer suburb of Amalfi, except that it sits hundreds of metres above it. This in turn meant climbing the roughly one thousand steps up the mountainside from Amalfi to Pontone.

So 45 minutes or so after I set off, I finally set foot in Pontone, exhausted and sweating, and being regarded with aloof amusement by the Pontoneans, who drove there in their Fiats up the road on the other side of the mountain. After catching my breath and the dregs of my dignity, I walked through the narrow lanes of Pontone to the pathway to the Torre.

Which was blocked off. It was closed by the order of the village authorities.

After saying a few tragic words, I turned around and started to trudge back to Amalfi. Then a trio of Italian hikers came up, and, barely glancing at the barrier, walked around it and trotted off towards the Torre.

While I was standing there, startled at this disregard for the barrier and the clear wishes of the village authorities, another Italian and his girlfriend turned up and went around the barrier. I overheard the Italian explain to his girlfriend that the Citte often closes access to the site when they can’t be bothered taking responsibility for idiot tourists, so the locals just access it as normal.

I contemplated this, and remembered that a healthy disregard for rules and authorities is a charming trait of the Italians (which at least partly explains their driving). So, in order to cultivate a more Italian mindset, it was my duty to bypass the barrier and head up to the Torre.

I didn’t regret it. After climbing a few more grueling flights of steps, I popped up onto the top of the ridge that runs from Pontone to the Torre. In open areas there were spectacular views down onto Amalfi and neighbouring Atrani, and wider views out over the Mediterranean and all the way to Salerno. In the less open areas, there were wide swathes of wildflowers, and cool cathedrals of pine trees.

The Torre itself was a relatively stumpy ruin, but it offered more stunning views, and plenty of opportunities for Benny to act in his official role as my selfie proxy.

Then I had to walk the whole way back to Amalfi. At least this time I had gravity on my side.

After a restorative gelato, I walked down to the Church of St Andrew, Amalfi’s main cathedral. It has a grand facade that dominates the Piazza, but the interior is larger and more impressive than even that grand facade would suggest. The church has been there in some form since at the 9th Century, and it has a well-resourced museum just off its main building.

One of the most interesting things I noticed wasn’t an actual part of the exhbits. Italians tend to build their walls out of any old masonry they find lying about the place, and in the case of the Church of St Andrew, that included old statuary.

I found it kind of sad. Someone was once important enough to have a bust of themselves carved out of marble, and it eventually ends up used as filler in a wall in a church, with only the nostrils sticking out. It's like discovering that all that remains of, say, Dolly Parton in the year 3000 is three fingers on a scrap of magazine used in papier mache for a school project.