Forte Dei Marmi on the Italian Riviera

From Florence, we headed to Forte Dei Marmi, a lovely seaside town with exquisite villas tucked behind walls on tree lined streets. After settling ourselves at the Hotel Pigalle a simple, summery B&B only one block from the heart of this fashionable seaside town on the Ligurian Sea we headed to the town center where, at an outdoor café, s little girl of around four approached our table with a pad and pencil, and pretended to take our order. She set off for the table next to us where she encountered a baby in a high chair and decided she’d rather play with the baby.

We’d come to Forte Dei Marmi so Bill could meet some of Vittorio’s good friends and enjoy the sea air and relaxed atmosphere. Giuliano took us and his wife and 12-year-old son to one of the exceptionally fine seafood restaurants in the area. Wanting to share the sea’s bounty with us, he ordered our meal. The first course, was also a first for me -- individual plates of raw fish: tuna, oysters, sea bass, and squid. Granted, the presentation was wonderful and I did my best to enjoy the “fresh from the sea” quality, but I much preferred the shrimp cooked in a delicate base of oil, that followed, a pasta with teeny, tiny clams (found only in the Forte dei Marmi area), flounder with artichokes, and pear, lemon and berry ice. We even had dessert, crème brulé with delicate cream-filled pastry shells.

The following day, in response to his question “What would you like to do tomorrow?,” Giuliano drove us toward the Cavi di Marmo -- the Carrara marble quarries -- stopping on the way at the old mountain town of Colonnata. The bells for Sunday Mass were ringing when we arrived, but we’d not come for Mass, though it was Sunday, nor for the famous Lardo di Colonatta (seasoned lard) produced there, but to view a large block of marble depicting the dangerous “lizzatura” system of transporting the immense blocks of marble down the mountainside via a series of wooden tracks that claimed the lives of many miners. The mines themselves were awe-inspiring -- a working mine more than a mile deep within the mountain, and the “blindingly white sunken amphitheater” where Michelangelo chose the marble for his famous Pietà.

At a restaurant near the Carrara seaport, Giuliano treated us to another feast, this one entirely of cooked fish: tiny octopus, a large fish with lacy red fins and great bulging eyes, varied fresh vegetables in herbed oil, and for dessert, seared strawberries and vanilla ice cream layered in paper thin pastry. When he dropped us back at the hotel, we were so stuffed that we fell onto our bed and slept until 3:30 that afternoon.

Having the evening to ourselves, Bill and I walked in the cooling dark along streets lined with high class shops and beautifully dressed Italian tourists. We bought fruit, bread, cheese and wine to eat in the quiet of our hotel room balcony and were savoring our rustic feast when the hotel manager, who’d been yelling (and I mean yelling) into the phone at the front desk came outside to cool off, noted our feast and the drying socks we’d draped over the terrace wall, shook his head in disbelief, and stormed back inside, leaving us convulsed in laughter and providing one more memory to savor at will.

Impressions of Florence

After numerous turns around a town square outside the walls of Florence, the GPS system leading us to the wrong building in a different section of town with the same address, and several phone calls to Donatella Mia, the proprietress, we finally arrived at Villa Malavolta B&B within walking distance of the city of Florence.

Rather than write about the city with its famous landmarks, I want to focus on my impressions of our stay there, memories that continue to enchant me six months later.

Impressions of our B&B: Donatella, tall and elegant and the exquisite walled villa that had been in her family for hundreds of years. Books piled on tables, on floors and nested in towering bookcases; walls rife with paintings; wooden floors supporting heavy antique furnishings; our blessed room – white and sun-washed, with its comfortable bed and little terrace overlooking an inner garden. On that terrace, accompanied by bird song and under the gaze of an ancient pine we ate chocolates and cheese and apples.

The city Florence with its narrow streets and darkened alleys, the frescoes and sporadic sunshine, people leaning backward to take photos of the wonders above them, students sprawled before the Chapel of St. Margaret, sketching the facade of the church whereDante was married and he first saw his beloved Beatrix. Bill is in his glory, his camera catching more than memorable buildings. He especially adores capturing the faces of the people, their gesticulations as they shop and talk, the arguments loud and often accompanied by laughter and gestures of apology. In Florence on our first night, we took the wrong bus and, at the insistence of a determined red-jacketed woman sitting in front of the bus – empty now of all riders save us – the bus driver turned the bus around and took us to a stop where we could catch the “correct” bus back to the Villa.

A plentiful breakfast of fresh pears and berries, coffee and brioche served in the 300-year-old kitchen launched our very long second day in the city where we visited the sites we missed the day before, sites our hostess said we shouldn’t miss. We walked to the artist’s quarter to dine where she told us the literati and artists ate – Trattoria Casalinga--and where we sat next to a portly, dark-eyed, dark-haired, boil-pocked man who slurped his food with immense gusto. We dined on Bistecca alla Fiorentina, served not in ounces but in pounds and we took the correct bus back to the villa late that night.

On our final morning, I was privileged to accompany the B&B proprietress Donatella – a well-known artist whose works have been exhibited worldwide -- to her artist's studio located on the other side of the garden where she not only paints but builds incredible three dimensional works with neon lights and Lucite. We left our car at the Villa and climbed the tree-lined Via del Monte delle Croce to catch the best views of the city from the Piazzale Michelangelo. We visited the starkly beautiful interior of the Basilica of San Miniato and walked through its terraced cemetery of family vaults and ornate tombs accompanied by music emanating from the basilica as a middle-aged monk drew beauty from the great organ within.

Assisi: parking ticket and all

We came to Assisi seeking St. Francis and Clare. We found them. We found, as well, a greeting from the Assisi police: a parking ticket. Parking in Assisi is limited to residents only.

Unaware of the ticket that awaited us on our return to the car, we blithely visited the Basilica of Santa Chiara and knelt before St. Clare's “miraculously preserved” body which, though blackened from its exposure to air, is in much better condition than poor St. Lucy, whose "in-corrupt" body I’d viewed years earlier in Venice.

a chapel at the Carceri on Monte Subasio

We then set off for the Basilica of San Francesco, and happened upon a side alley leading to a small shrine I’d not been to before. The Chiesa Nuova is the home where Francis once lived and where his father – a wealthy cloth merchant -- once imprisoned him.

Francis, as the story goes, had been praying in the rundown chapel of San Damiano, when the crucifix spoke to him, requesting that he “rebuild [Christ's] church which is falling into ruin.” Francis, believing he was meant to rebuild the decrepit chapel where he received the message rushed back to his father's shop, sold an expensive bolt of cloth, and gave the proceeds to the priest to use to restore the chapel. Francis’ father, duly enraged by such profligacy, had imprisoned and repudiated his son.

While on the way to the Basilica of San Francesco, I was reminded that people actually live in Assisi when we encountered a small group of Italian toddlers dressed in checkered pinafores and linked hand and hand that wavered like tiny butterflies across the Piazza Comune.

To get to shrine, which very immensity would embarrass the saint were he alive, one must traverse many narrow, winding, cobbled streets that, without a map, could totally confuse the traveler. But the view as one walks downhill toward to Basilica from the city makes it, in my estimation, the best way to approach the shrine. The sweep of the Cathedral before us, the wide boulevard and sculptured lawns, made getting lost well worth our confusion.

Beryl on the walk down from the city to the Basilica of San Francesco

I'd hoped that in visiting Assisi, Bill would encounter some of the spiritual aspects of its heritage that had led me, as a teenager, to enter the Poor Clare Franciscans. The Basilica is famed for its art depicting Francis's life, so while he moved thoughtfully from one Giotto fresco to another, I sought the lower level, drawn by the knowledge that there I’d find the tomb of St. Francis.

The lower Basilica is a place of dim light and silence. There, away from the voices of guides and pilgrims praying in large groups, one can kneel or sit quietly, to contemplate the mysteries of a life so filled with love of Jesus that its light still radiates throughout the world.

I’d named my daughter Francesca after this beloved saint, and while kneeling there, bathed in the light of a hundred or more flickering candles, my heart was filled with thoughts of her. I asked for a mass to be offered for Francesca who’d died nine years earlier, praying that she'd found the peace she'd been unable to find in life. I lit a candle for my son Thomas. On the way back to the upper Basilica, I passed a modern day Francis: a young pilgrim in torn sweater and ragged pants, kneeling, arms cruciform at the back of the chapel, his face uplifted in prayer.

There is much to see in Assisi and we packed as much of it as we could into one day. We visited the convent of San Damiano, the birthplace of the Poor Clare Order, where St. Clare had lived and where bouquets of flowers marked the place where she'd sat in the refectory and the floor where she'd died.

The refectory at San Damiano

We walked the paths of the Carceri on Monte Subasio. We visited the hovels at Rivo Torto. We stood within the tiny chapel of the Portiuncula where Clare had dedicated her life to God and where Francis – marked with the wounds of Christ – yielded back to God the life he’d lived for love of God.

Our souls surfeited, our legs aching, we went in search of food and found it across the street from the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli where the Portiuncula sits like a precious gem within the great vaults of its interior. Legs rested, appetites satisfied, we headed back to the Hotel Delfina in Foligno for a night's rest before heading to Florence on the morrow..

On the way to Assisi: Foligno

We ate breakfast on the terrace in Amalfi, served by skinny Renaldo who buzzed and hummed about, making an occasional nervous foray into conversation about his marriage to a Russian woman from Eastern Siberia, his three year old child, how he works all night and goes home to play with his child before sleeping in the afternoon – all in Italian mind you. The young man who helped Bill carry our bags to the car, down the numerous flights of stairs, was not nearly as affable.

“For one night in this hotel you need all these bags?” We didn’t bother to explain that bringing all the bags into the hotel wasn’t our decision. The young woman who helped us unload informed us that “Your car will be parked in a public garage,” and insisted everything be removed before giving it to the attendant to park.

Even our GPS had a hard time finding the Delfina Palace Hotel in Foligno where we would spend two nights while visiting Assisi. A new 4-star hotel, the Delfina was a sprawling but mostly empty hotel set in a formal landscape of gardens in a rural setting along the Via Romana Antica outside Foligno. It was the only place we stayed that had an abundance of empty parking spaces – unusual in a country with too many cars and too many tourists. During our first night visit, we saw only five people -- two men and a woman in the lobby bar, the girl behind the desk and the waiter in charge of the breakfast room but our room was spacious, making up in comfort what it lacked in activity.

Deciding that we did not want to eat in the sprawling empty dining room, we headed into Foligno to find a place to dine and got hopelessly lost in a tangle of dark streets. A young woman in a still open flower shop personally took us to Lassame Lento, a tiny, hidden, and unimposing little trattoria where we feasted among single working men on varied antipasto selections, tagliatelle with tartuffe (truffles), house wine, and for desert a delicate panna cotta with fresh berry sauce.

Our evening in Foligno came to a close as we walked back to our car, preceded by three Franciscan Friars in their habits, laughing and eating ice-cream cones as they walked.

Positano and the wine of memory

Bill and I woke to our final morning in Piano di Sorrento to the sound of children's voice emanating from a small school one block away: the Scuola Via della Acacha -- A public elementary school with a choir of little ones that sang like angels.

As if the Pied Piper were leading a group of singing children down the streets of the town, I felt the pull of that music. The children were still singing as we pulled away from the Maison de Titty and began our trip to Positano.

I know it sounds extreme, but Positano holds the wine of my most potent memories. It was there, many years ago, that the sight of small school children dressed in blue smocks and pinafores skipping home for lunch, brought an ache to my heart. There where we ate freshly caught fish on the beach and bought baskets of strawberries and wine. There in a hotel overlooking the sea --where the bougainvillea-covered patio shielded us from the sun as we ate breakfast, where in a room filled with the scent of blossoming lemon trees and soft afternoon breezes -- that we made love for the first time.

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As in all the towns along the Amalfi Coast, one does a lot of climbing in Positano. Cars cannot negotiate the town proper and we considered ourselves lucky to find a parking space way, way, above the town. We descended via a narrow stair-and alleyway down the cliffside, arriving at Fornillo's Spiaggia, a beachside hotel where Bill drank espresso and I sipped a frosted glass of freshly squeezed orange juice (which one finds all over Italy, even at highway rest-stops) under a lovely open gallery.

I was surprised by the number of tourist in the town proper. By October the crowds have usually thinned. Thirty-five years ago, if my memory serves, there were no crowds. It was just a small fishing town clinging to the Amalfi Coast. High-end shops didn't cluster under its arcades, and I remember only a few small restaurants. But as then, the town was radiant with flowers cascading from every balcony and terrace and adorning windows and stairways.

No longer there, was the plaque on the wall outside the cathedral telling the story of the miraculous statue that had washed up on the beach, but within the Cathedral, behind iron gates a statue of the virgin stood to the left of a side altar. I'd never seen the statue. When Vittorio and I were there the cathedral was closed, so I can't verify the statue's existence behind those gates.

When Bill and I sought a place to eat lunch, none resembled the simple trattoria where Vittorio and I had eaten. We had a fine meal, though, at a restaurant called La Cambusa where we sat on under a bright orange awning above the beach and watched the artists below at work. I had mixed feelings about having to leave the town so soon after lunch. I wanted to do more exploring, but more of the gorgeous Amalfi Drive lay ahead of us and one doesn't want to miss one curve or one view by driving in the dark.

Slide Show of our first days in Italy: Rome

This should have been posted before the Ostia Antica to Amalfi as the slides in this smilebox preceded that trip by four days.

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Hot Dog Rolls for breakfast and a day in Capri

As if she'd been awaiting the exact moment of our arrival on the patio for breakfast the next morning, Rita –Titty’s mother (of La Maison de Titty), hurried out with tiny éclairs with Nutella, coffee, and . . . of all things … hot dog rolls. These rolls tickled our funny bones. We’d hoped for the small hard rolls we’d slathered with butter and jelly in Rome but had gotten hot dog rolls. We did have prosciutto and cheese, however, and I found that these together with jelly (don’t cringe) on dried tostini (melba toasts) made a satisfactory breakfast.

Michele, Titty’s father, was waiting for us when we emerged with our cameras and carry bags from our room to drive us to the port in Sorrento. After showing us where to wait for the ferry to Capri, he disappeared, reappearing again suddenly with two bus tickets for our return trip to Piano di Sorrento that evening. Touched by this generosity, we found it easy to forgive La Maison de Titty the hot dog rolls for breakfast.

Determined to do Capri by bus, we waited for half an hour in the hot Capri sun before Bill, bless him, decided to hire one of the open-topped cabs waiting to ferry the more spend-thrift tourists around the island. I felt like a movie star with my sun glasses and straw hat as we cruised up and down Capri’s lush roads on Luigi’s tour. First stop was the Blue Grotto, where with Bill tucked between my legs, and a sweet Canadian woman tucked between Bill’s legs – her husband in front behind the oarsman, we ducked simultaneously as the small boat surged into the luminescent cave, our boatman’s tenor shimmering off the rocks and echoing throughout the chamber.

From the Blue Grotto, Luigi took us to Anacapri where we spent a wonderful hour wandering through San Michele, the roman villa that famed physician and author Axel Munch built with what remained of Emperor Tiberius’s old palace. Though crowded with tourists, the site elicited in me a great sense of inner quiet as I roamed about taking photos of the columned porticoes, exquisite gardens, and magnificent views. From there it was back to Capri via Marina Piccola, the exquisite bay with its amazing pinnacled rocks.

Back in Capri, having paid Luigi too much, we went in search of the Gardens of Augustus with views of the surrounding terrain and sea, and then – seeing from that vantage point what looked like a monastery – down to the Cloisters of San Giacomo, which were unfortunately closed by the time we reached them. From there we wandered through narrow alleys and side streets back down to Capri – a walk which could have been called a Tour of Capri Cats because kitties were everywhere: tucked under bushes and into the niches of walls, lying on columns and stairways, or leaping after flies.

My favorite memory of this trip, however, is not of the scenery or sites, but of Bill’s laughter as he watched the dynamics between a couple nearby.

“Give me some water, will you?” the wife demands of her husband, turning to chat with a group of tourists. Her husband gets a bottled water from the sack he’s carrying and holds it out to her. She keeps on chatting. He keeps on offering the bottle. For a good five minutes he stands there, lifting the bottle toward her, until he finally gives up, shrugs, and puts the water back in his bag. Charlie Chaplin could have made hay with this seedling.