Atrani, Italy

The next arvo, June 19, we took a plane from Gatwick to Rome. On arriving at Termini station, we tried to call Farid, the guy with whom we’d organised accommodation. We spent ages trying to work out how to use the public phones (and gained €6 in the process!) or contact him on our mobiles. Eventually we gave up and asked a tourist info guy, who, in true dodgy Italian style, offered us a 3 star hotel for the same price as our original accommodation. I was so suss about the whole thing, to the point that the hotel receptionist started making jokes about it, calling me the chief and the one who calls the shots. Turns out it wasn’t dodgy at all – we didn’t get stuff stolen from our room, or get charged heaps, and they can’t use our credit card details because I insisted we pay cash. Oops, I think I may have offended them. At least they were laughing about it. So once we’d put our luggage away, we went out for a late pizza and gelati dinner by the Trevi Fountain in the balmy summer heat – nice!

The next day, we picked up a hire car and drove down to Atrani, on the Amalfi Coast. We survived driving on the right side of the road, only almost crashing a few times: sometimes from being on the wrong side of the road, but other times because of people changing lanes badly at ridiculously high speeds. We also survived the crazy narrow, windy Amalfi Coast road. Atrani is a beautiful, tiny fishing village of about 1,000 residents that you’d struggle to find on a map. I really enjoyed our week there: a mix of touristing and chilling out while getting to know the place and the locals. I hazily remembered the area from being there 5 years ago when I travelled in Italy, England, Scotland and Hong Kong with a friend Maddi and her family, so it was really cool getting to know it again.

In our time in Atrani, we visited Amalfi a few times, a touristy town next door, for limoncello, pottery and pastries. We took a bus round the crazy roads to Positano, another tourist spot, where we shopped and swam, and caught a ferry back. We took a bus up to Ravello, a town high in the mountains with great views over other Amalfi Coast towns and the Mediterranean. But we also spent plenty of time hanging out at Atrani. We swam at the beach there, and swam round to the neighbouring cove. We walked up to a church that sits high above the town, called Chiesa Santa Maria dei Bandi, and to another that was closer called Santa Maria Maddalena. Katie watched lots of Italian fashion TV and we all read lots – especially Harry Potter 6 in preparation for the movie. We ate dinner at a few of the restaurants in the piazza – some quite bad (but cheap too) and one really good one. We discovered our favourite gelati shop, which we went to most days, and chatted to the guy there. We hung out on the beach at night. We nicknamed one of the café owners ‘sleazy man’, because he watched us 3 girls every time we were in the piazza, sometimes winking and waving. Turns out he wasn’t that sleazy, just friendly – maybe it’s the Italian male way. One night I chatted with a guy called Luca from a nearby town, Minori: similar slightly sleazy thing, but mostly friendly – it was fun chatting actually! One night just after dinner in the piazza, most of the town started gathering and the cafes hung big-screen TVs on their outside doors… for a Confederations Cup soccer match between Italy and Brazil! It was great timing that we were in the piazza and able to share in some of the excitement. The most hilarious part was when an Italian player kicked a goal for Brazil that pretty much sealed the match. Understandably, the crowd cleared immediately after the match.

In that week, we felt like we grew accustomed to the Italian way of life. We ate breakfasts of chocolate-filled croissants or sweet bread with nutella. Lunch was crusty bread with oil, oregano, prosciutto, roma tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella and lettuce, later in the day than in Australia. We kept siesta every day, resting or sleeping between 2 and 5pm. Which was great because the Italian beds and pillows are really hard which made sleeping through the night tough, so we appreciated the extra rest. It’d be awesome for Australia to have siesta! Dinner was often pasta or fish. Mum and Dad enjoyed their espressos and us our iced tea and gelati. We picked up a fair amount of basic Italian, from last time Kate and I were there, and from Kate and Em learning it at primary school. There were bells in Atrani that went off every 15mins, which, after we’d worked out how they worked, we didn’t even notice by the end of our time there.