Nocelle & Positano

September 16 – October 13, 2009

Nocelle and Positano

We live in the clouds in a vertical world. The road leads up from the Amalfi Coast highway, above Positano, snaking along the edge of a cliff and goes up and up and up. The road is wide enough for our red, white and orange bus, with its characteristic, only buses have, type horn much in use. It sounds vaguely, like the trumpeting of an elephant. (Though I don't know any elephants). When drivers meet they negotiate squeezing by each other who knows how. There is a low, green, iron fence along the edge of the cliff. Once you get to the parking lot at the end of the long road you have reached Nocelle. We go down 105 steps and walk along a narrow sidewalk past the only store, (and sometimes pizzeria) all along, just below and just above, are more steps to houses clinging to the cliff. We walk past the church square, the upscale San Croce restaurant, past a little cave grotto up another 30 steps where the sidewalk narrows and then ends. From where the sidewalk ends begins the “Path of the Gods” but we go up another 80 steps to the roof of Villa Pina our new location for a few weeks. We have a bedroom, bathroom a little kitchen and a huge deck to watch the heavens and the tiny world below. The weather has continued to be unsettled with sunny days, thunderstorms, heavy rain and wind so the sky and cloud show has been pretty spectacular.

Our bus goes down to Positano every hour from early morning until about 11PM. Positano is a cute, vertical town with more than its share of designer boutiques and stores for the tourists, but there is also a core of people who live in Positano and as we have discovered it is a much nicer place to be than neighboring Amalfi, where all the tour buses go and the tourist frenzy is amped up.

Some days we just spend time looking at the constantly changing skies from our rooftop deck, while reading and playing scrabble. Our local store stocks everything we need, all local produce, cheese and meat and eggs and fruit, pasta, wine and beer. Pina gives us grapes, potatoes and lemons from the garden. Everyone farms long and rectangular plots on the side of the cliff. Pina has rabbits and chickens and a very big garden. These orange melons that resemble a squash are ripe at this very moment neither cantaloupe or green melon they are VERY delicious.

No one blocks anyone else’s view of the great expanse of sea to the west. We venture farther and farther every time we go on the Walk of the Gods, it is a spectacular trail lush with vegetation, trees and grasses we could travel along all the way down to the next town Praiano, but we prefer to stay high.

We did walk all the way down to Positano down 1700 steps, only to arrive on the highway, a no fun walking place, so we reserving our walks for the Path of the Gods and bus up and down to town.

My birthday, San Gennero’s feast day, was a sunny day. We took a boat trip down the Amalfi Coast. Salvatore and his brother Gennaro do boat trips in their small boats. “Lumo e il Mare”. Salvatore was our captain. Coincidently it was his birthday also, he was turning 67. Everyday Gloria, an expat gal from the USA joins the tour. She has been living in Positano for 22 years and is almost eighty. Gloria loves to swim so we would stop periodically, they would lower a little ladder and we could go into the sea. Salvatore would gather various sea life from the rocks and then we would slow boat again. We cruised all the way to Amalfi and then on the way back stopped in at a seaside restaurant where Salvatore’s daughter and a few of his family were waiting to surprise him with oysters from Brittany and prosecco and cake, along with the usual antipasto, primero secundo etc. etc. We lunched and drank and lunched some more and it was all very enjoyable to have lucked into a joint birthday celebration. During lunch Salvatore got a call saying that the blood of San Gennero had liquefied within 55 minutes so it was going to be a good year. Even though Salvatore was born on San Gennero’s feast day it is his older brother that was named after the saint.

This past Thursday we planned to head to Capri (pronounced CA-pri) with Gennero which everyone was telling us was a fun trip, but it was so rough and threatening rain that all boats, even the ferries that go various places were all cancelled. We decided to go up to music city Ravello, way up the mountain above Amalfi. We bought tickets for the SITA buses, which travel up and down the coast and off we went, with many others. There was a lot of waiting in the rain for the buses and elbowing to get on once they come, but Ravello is a beautiful place that hosts many classical musicians all summer who play on a stage hanging off the side of a cliff. The highlight was spending time at a shop called: “Wine and Drugs”, yes the name drew us in, it was nice to sit in the lovely shop eating cheese and chocolate and sampling wine while it rained outside. Even the glasses were special. The Croation shopkeeper was a consummate sales man, so we walked away with a nice bottle of wine and an even nicer bottle of prosecco, which we are saving for a special occasion.

The very exciting, undiscovered thing about Positano is the beach glass. The beach is not a sandy beach but filled with smooth rocks and pebbles. This makes the perfect beach glass-processing environment. I would say that perhaps 1 or 2 percent of the beach is very smooth beach glass. There are also such a variety of broken tile pieces, also very lovely. Sea glass and beach glass lovers should definitely make Positano a place of pilgrimage.

www.flickr.com