3. The long and winding road

Finally, after a few false starts we got to St Peters. Monday the queue was huge, Tuesday morning it was four times the hugeness. Tuesday afternoon we left our room to try again and I discovered it was cold so went back for hat and scarf. We got two blocks from our room then it started raining. Back to hotel for coats. Now utterly determined to see flipping thing whatever happened next. Queue was approximately 3/4 of initial hugeness, and the rain didn’t last long, so we were away.

For me the highlight was seeing Michaelangelo’s Pieta, it is so beautiful and to think he sculpted it when he was 24. Not being any kind of Christian, let alone a devout Catholic one, I didn’t feel the great spiritual connection the PA kept exorting me to feel. Pope John Paul II’s tomb attracts quite a crowd, he was a nice looking chap. Pity his successor looks like the Emperor in Star Wars. He is on all manner of calendars sold around the city, but really, who would want his mug staring at them as they cook dinner or answer the call of nature. He looks ready to shoot thunderbolts at any moment.

We bought a calendar that made us laugh every time we saw it – handsome young priests for each month of 2009! Really it seemed so odd to sell sexy priests, but hey, that Vatican must take some upkeep and we’ve made our contribution.

We popped back to the Spanish steps to find a Camper (shoe) shop and gorged ourselves on luxury labels. Not literally, but even walking past 50 incredibly decadent designer shops made us feel like we had eaten a Vogue magazine. So we went to McDonalds, just to balance things out. I know, terrible to eat at symbol of American crassness when in one of world’s capitals of style and great cuisine, but they do serve deep fried crayfish claws.

Now, the plan originally was to take a train from Rome to Sorrento, with a brief stop to change trains at Naples. However, as we checked out of our Rome hotel, the lovely hotel man urged, nay, insisted, that we abandon this plan in favour or taking the train further south to the port town of Salerno and then taking a ferry to Sorrento. This would be BEAUTIFUL he said. We capitulated.

The train was fine. Salerno was…fine. A nice Irish couple bound for Positano had some timetable printed off the internet that seemed to suggest the next ferry was at 3.30, a hour away. We decided to get some lunch. We found a nice cafe. We ordered. Time passed. I got anxious, more time passed. It was 3.00. I drew a picture of a ferry, wrote 3.30 next to it, and showed it to the waitress. Much conversation ensued, none of it understood by the other. She said “pronto” a lot, I nodded and said “si” a lot. 3.10, food appeared. We gobbled like turkeys, paid, fled. We ran to the pier, our wheely suitcases bouncing along the cobblestones behind us.

As we arrived up at the pier, a gnarled fisherman got up from his perch beside his boat and told us there was no ferry that day, due to the weather. He gestured helplessly at the water behind him, as though a storm were raging. Flat. As. A. Millpond. We repeated the conversation to confirm that a complete lack of any wave was preventing the ferry from sailing.

With heavy sighs, we turned back to the bus station. We marched there, determined not to miss a bus out of town. I approached the first person in a uniform I saw. “Sorrento?” he said as though we were mad. Apparantly we had to get a bus to Amalfi, then change and get a bus to Sorrento.

And so it came to be, that we not only viisted the thrilling port town of Salerno, but made the actually thrilling bus trip ride along the famous Amalfi coast. It is vertiginous, and precipitous, and all those other good words that mean steep, narrow, and dangerous. Eight hours after leaving Rome, we got to Sorrento.

More to come…