to Sorrento!

rimorchio da vendere o affitto,
stanze lasciare cinquanta centesimi,
nessun telefono, nessuno stagno, nessun animali domestici,
non ho alcune sigarette…

Back to being a “King of the Road” again. Italian style.

I decided to make my way to Sorrento. It’s a resort town just north of the Amalfi coast and south of Napoli. Originally, I was going to Naples itself. After spending a week in big-city Rome, I thought it would be better to relax seaside for a few days before heading to Israel.

After completing the short express train trip to the main station in Naples, I am glad that I decided to skip Naples. I don’t like the looks of Napoli, from the guidebooks or from the train. The city appears both gritty and charmless. I’m sure I could dig some charm out of the place, if I tried. Someday, maybe I will.

Sorrento, on the other hand, is charming. But arriving at the “bed and breakfast” broke the spell. My fault. I slapped together last minute accommodations, feeling lucky to get any reasonably priced room. “La Nuit Sorrento.” The name and website should have tipped me. The website (warning!) has annoying smarmy Italian music that cannot be skipped or switched off (website design circa 1999.) The B&B itself is another converted apartment building flat, as was the Daphne [see earlier post]. The young couple running it are well-intentioned, but are clearly amateur hoteliers. It was an OK place, it’s just that nothing quite worked right, or went off without trouble.

We had a misunderstanding about my arrival time. When I got there and stood outside the locked gate on the busy main street of Sorrento, no one answered the gate buzzer or the phone. After standing next to buzzing traffic for 30 minutes, I sneaked in behind someone. I found my way into the apartment building (since it’s a regular apt building, there is no signage for the B&B). While I was standing forlornly in the first floor lobby, an Italian woman said to, “B&B? Mezzo piso.” Or something like that. I took the antiquated elevator to the middle floor. Unfortunately, I opened the interior elevator doors just before the car actually got there. The car shuddered to a stop 10 centimeters below the 3rd floor, and wouldn’t budge. I opened the exterior door, pulled my luggage over the 10 cm threshold, and rolled into the foyer. One of the apt doors had a small sign: “La Nuit Sorrento” Locked, no answer. I leaned against a wall to wait. As the residents slowly cycled in and out of their apartments, they first encountered the broken elevator, and then turned to eye me. They pieced together the story, and with increasingly irate tones complained to each other, gesturing towards me. I couldn’t take the elevator back down with my luggage and I couldn’t get into the B&B. Things were getting a little tense when the proprietors showed up after another half hour.

They let me in, introduced themselves, and used their handheld device to serially decline all of my (perfectly valid) credit cards. Then they insisted I pay cash. In advance. This, I refused. They took this in stride, and showed me my room. My blue, blue, blue room. The theme of the place is a Sorrentino interpretation of a French interpretation of a Sorrento night. Everything painted blue, and dimly lit. My room featured slightly more stale tobacco smell than I usually like, but slightly less than I can tolerate. There are only 4 rooms in the whole place, so I’m sure none are truly non-smoking.

Many little things didn’t work, or weren’t quite right. After a while, I stopped being annoyed, and just started laughing. Here’s my favorite: The bathroom door wasn’t framed squarely, so it stuck in the middle of its swing. You had to lift up on the handle to make the bottom of the door not scrape the floor. The bath was small enough that I had to open and close the door regularly – I couldn’t just leave it open. On my first shower, I got out, and moved the door, lifting up as I swung it. This time it came off the hinges, and I catch the door before it falls over. I successfully put it back on it’s hinges. But now it won’t open at all, and I realize that the critical piece is a coiled piece of paper clip that was wrapped on the hinge pin, and has now fallen off. Dripping wet me, falling towel, door held up in one hand, reaching across floor for bent piece of paper clip wire with the other hand. Ahh, the romance of travel. La Nuit Sorrento. I’m sorry, but I don’t have a sketch of that moment for you.

In that first evening, I had a better experience. Sorrento is mostly arranged along a dramatic series of cliffs, with marinas below. Once section of town is actually down on one of the marinas: Marina Grande. This is a working port, fishing boats, boatbuilding businesses, but also interesting seaside restaurants. I went to one (name?) and had a nice dinner on the water, and met a nice couple who chatted me up. Anthony and Palma. The great thing about our conversation was that they didn’t know who I was, what I did. I talked about taking this trip, finishing my drawing class. I showed them some iPhone pix of my drawing work, and of a woman I really care about. And they spun a whole life for me in which they assumed I would go into art somehow, and probably start a family, become a dad. These aren’t roles that I particularly am seeking out, but it was really wonderful to see a vision of a new life for myself through someone else’s eyes. That other people, not constrained by what they know about me – what I know about me – can imagine a completely different and rich life for me. And that dimensions of my life that haven’t existed before, can.

I spent the next day just lounging around and walking the little town of Sorrento. Taking in the sea and town views, swimming in the Mediterranean, lying in a rental beach chair and umbrella. I sketched distant Napoli and Vesuvius across the Bay of Naples. A good unwinding from Rome.