1.4
As usual, slept not at all last night for
fear of oversleeping. If we were to miss the 9:15 train from Fidenza we
wouldn’t be able to catch our Frecciarossa south. And we love our Frecciarossa
south – direct from Bologna to Salerno. However, not only got out in plenty of
time, but in time to forget something in the car and be able to go back from
the station to get it (about a 5 minute walk each way).
Our B&B was a longish walk from the
station, but it’s CONSIDERABLY warmer here and so it wasn’t terrible. And it
hadn’t started raining yet. Beautiful little hotel. Our room is by far the
nicest we’ve stayed in all this year. No view except of the interior courtyard,
but a lovely room in grey and cream and beige, very soothing. I knew, but
hadn’t really processed, that Salerno is a port town; we’re half a block from
the sea. We walked down to have a look, but it started to rain again so we cut
our walk short. Off now to explore for dinner.
2.4
Dinner was quite delicious – pappardelle
with mushrooms and sausage in a cheese sauce – but the owner offered me “a
taste” of a local ricotta that I think didn’t agree with me. It was delicious,
but insanely rich and I ate too much of it. So I was up all crampy and
miserable in the night, bleh. Seemed an inauspicious start to a day that was
forecast to have thunderstorms.
However, come the morning and breakfast,
things changed. The only other couple in the B&B are Florence and Henri, an
elderly pair of friends from Paris. Their respective spouses died 12 years ago,
and they have hung out and traveled together ever since. We got to chatting
with them over breakfast, and it turned out that they were going to Paestum
today! I opined that we should go together, not realizing that they had rented
a car for their Italian vacation. I meant go on the bus together, but they said
sure, we’ll take you down. They were going further south after Paestum so we
would have to make our own way back, but one bus ride instead of two is always
high on my list.
She used to teach French to American
diplomatic corps folks, so her English is very good, and I got to limp along in
a little French with them, which was kind of nice. I understood the majority of
what they said, but of course with no practice of any kind since I left Berlitz
and not a lot then, producing anything intelligent was rather labored. However,
we were all able to understand each other fine in the end.
They weren’t going to be ready to go till
11, so we walked up to the Museum of the Medical School of Salerno, which is
just across the piazza from here. It was kind of a bust, as it’s only a series
of videos about medieval school, which was fine and interesting, but they were
all in Italian and the acoustics were terrible so they were kinda hard to
understand. There were no exhibits per se. The only exhibits available are all
18th-20th C, boo, and are at the Papi Museum of Medicine,
which is in a building that was once part of the 13th C medical
school, and which sits above either the original medical school herb garden or
a reproduction (not completely clear from the lady at the Med School museum
which it was). If it’s not raining we’ll go up and look at the garden tomorrow.
We then walked down to the shore and Ro played in the park near the sea until
time to rejoin Florence and Henri.
The whole ride down to Paestum was just
lovely – sunshine and blue sky directly overhead, but plenty of threatening
clouds on the horizon. Florence drove. I tried to imagine Mamma driving out of
Salerno and down unfamiliar Italian country roads, and failed. Henri is a bit
more frail, and he argued with her the whole way about the directions. However,
they seem to have been accurate enough. I probably couldn’t have gotten any
pictures worth keeping on the ride down, but I totally understood looking at
the countryside why the Romans were so excited about acquiring Campania, and
indeed, why it’s called “Land of Fields”. With the Mediterranean on one side
and lush farmland stretching into the mountains on the other, it definitely had
its attractions for a nation that believed itself to be composed entirely of
yeoman farmers. The poverty was pretty evident as well, which was depressing,
but the cherry trees were in bloom, so I
concentrated on that. I do wonder why the Mediterranean was so intensely brown
close to the shore but so very turquoise at the horizon. All churned up close
to shore I guess, but why. The trees along the shore were also curious: they
all bent toward the shore. I would have understood AWAY from the shore.
Apparently the offshore breeze is the one that prevails here. And it’s a
serious one – all the trees at the road edge of the forest, that basically
functioned as the windbreak for the rest of the woods, were bent at about a 60
degree angle to the ground.
Once we got to Paestum they dropped us off,
since being young and spry we would be going a lot faster than they would
(they’re both in their 80s). We had to walk the length of the zona archeologica
to get to the museum to buy tickets. Naturally, within seconds of our entering
the actual park the clouds started to gather in earnest. We walked the length
of it and looked at what we could, but by the time we were about halfway down,
the rain had started. I had only brought one umbrella and Rose wanted to run
around, so I stayed fairly dry and she got soaked. The rain just got fiercer
and fiercer, so we gave up and headed back toward the cluster of pizzerias to
get something to eat and get warm. I wasn’t actually hungry, so Rosie ate while
getting colder and colder in her wet shirt. Fortunately I had on a long-sleeved
tshirt and a flannel shirt on top, so when we got to the museum we took off her
shirt and rolled the sleeves up high on her so she could move. It was a good
enough arrangement, and she wasn’t cold anymore.
The museum was very cool, and Rose even
liked it. The tomb paintings from the Greco-Lucan portion of the city were
amazing. Rose got bored before I could read all the exhibition cards I wanted
to, but I took pictures of some to read later. On the top floor, however, there
was an exhibit of Neolithic period artifacts that she was fascinated by – the
area has been continuously inhabited for sure since nearly 8000 BCE, and maybe
even before then. There was a video of how someone from about 8000 BCE would
have made a stone knife, a copper dagger, and a clay pitcher. She really
enjoyed finding the original objects in the exhibition. Note to self: keep an
eye out for similar exhibits in future.
When we left the museum, the sun was out
again, so I decided to assay getting to the far end to get pictures of the
second temple to Hera (I had gotten a couple of the first one before the rain
got too bad). By the time I got to the second temple, yes, it had started to
rain again. I snapped three pictures and headed back quick to where Aurora was
waiting with the umbrella. Naturally by the time I got to her the sun was back
out. Zeus clearly hates me.
We found the bus stop to get back to
Salerno. The rain started up again and the temperature started to drop (I had
been okay without my flannel shirt until now). Fortunately the heavens didn’t
OPEN until after we were on the bus. We napped pretty much the whole way back
to Salerno. Got cheap pizza and ice cream for supper and came back to the
B&B. We walked the length of the zona archeologica six times in all, so I’m
guessing we’ll sleep pretty well tonight!
3.4
We ran into Florence again at breakfast
this morning. We seem to have done well to take the bus back – when she and
Henri returned to their car in the afternoon, they discovered a flat tire – and
then the heavens opened on them! They got soaked and had to wait almost 3 hours
for the equivalent of AAA to show up, and by then had missed their dinner party
further south. They apparently got back to the B&B about the same time they
had originally planned, but with no supper!
Today was “look at Salerno” day. We went to
Museo Archeologico, the Duomo, and the Giardino della Minerva. The Museo was
very small, but free, and had a couple exhibits that Rosie really enjoyed. I
can’t tell you how happy it makes me that she’s interested in all this stuff.
Most of the museum’s exhibits come from a settlement just outside of modern
Salerno called Fratte, which was inhabited from about 900 BCE, first by an
Italic tribe associated with the Samnites, then Greeks, then Lucanians, then
finally the Romans. However, the Romans seem to have prefered the sites of
Salerno and some other directly coastal towns, and by 300 CE the site was
abandoned. This, of course, is good for us students of archaeology, as it is
apparently the case that the whole site was pretty much left alone until the
1800s, so there were GOBS of graves and their goods still intact. (Rosie did
rush me through reading all the signs, so I know I saw the number 80 at one
point, but not sure if that was total graves or excavated graves or what.) We
looked particularly carefully at the amber beads (red amber, very pretty), the
chariot wheel and silver crown that one man had with him, and the various pots
that had been crushed at some point and that someone had been able to piece
back together. Having tried to put a broken cup back together, Ro understood
exactly how difficult this must have been! There was also a short series of
computer simulations of what the buildings and graves of the main part of site
must have looked like where the bulk of the artifacts were found. Rosie has
learned enough about archeology at this point that her comment was, “But it
didn’t look exactly like that, did it. That’s just what we think it probably
did.” So proud.
We also took a brief look at the showpiece
of the museum, a bronze head of Apollo. Seems a fisherman was pulling up his
net one day in May 1932, and was all excited that it was heavy. Alas, not with
fish! The head is about 150% life size and in absolutely perfect condition.
Just gorgeous. But frankly, we enjoyed the 8th-3rd c BCE
stuff more.
After the museum on our way back to the
hotel, we passed a kids’ clothing shop. Ro wanted to go in because she has
wanted new blue jeans for a long time. This was admittedly the first place we’d
found that was just kids 6-10 sized clothes. She found a few things right away
that she liked. They were crazy expensive, but she’s so happy with the jeans,
and she is outgrowing most of her shirts, that I just decided to deal with it.
Next we went in search of lunch, then for a
nap. It had been raining all morning and we didn’t want to go to the garden in
the rain. However, when we got up from naps the sun was out and it was a
beautiful afternoon, so we headed for the duomo and the Giardino della Minerva.
The duomo was close and, as it turned out, not terribly interesting to me. The
outside was fabulous, very early with lots of Roman bits and pieces just sort
of lying around in a beautiful 13th c –looking courtyard. The inside
was apparently completely redone in the early 1700s and was therefore, to me,
boring. Someday maybe I’ll learn enough about all this new-fangled art to be
interested, but not today.
The Giardino was a long walk. It’s close to
the top of the hill where the medieval castle looked down over the town, so it
was lots of up. It was a good thing we took our naps and stopped at the Duomo –
the garden was closed until 5 and we got there at 4:45. Aurora was really
annoyed and didn’t want to wait for them to open, but the caretaker was just
inside the gate as we were talking about it and opened early for us.
It’s not the exact same garden as the one
maintained by the Scuola Medica Salernitana in the 1300s, but it’s in the same general spot and has
many of the same plants. The current garden was laid out in the 1600s after
earthquakes and landslides had rearranged a big chunk of the hillside, but the
man who had originally planned the Scuola garden had left copious notes about
what he had chosen and why, so the “new” garden is on a similar plan. It goes
up the side of the hill in a series of terraces, and the modern caretakers have
not only put out the Italian and Latin names of all the plants on the labels,
but also whether the useful parts of the plant were hot, dry, cold, or wet, in
accordance with medieval usage. The path layout on the bottom-most terrace had
a sort of compass rose of fire/air/water/earth and degrees of hot/cold/wet/dry
along the paths, and all the plants on that circle were arranged according to
the compass. The upper terraces seem to have been more on a “these look pretty
together” plan, as there was no obvious pattern to the plantings. The view from
the top was magnificent. Sun didn’t hurt any either! We didn’t see the plants
that were in the video from the museum, but they did have a mandrake on special
display in a glass-front box only partly in dirt, so you could see the “body”.
When the caretaker asked if we enjoyed our look around (we spent nearly an
hour), I said we were very disappointed, as we had not heard the mandrake
scream. He shrugged his shoulders and sighed. “Well, you know how it is – if
you don’t yank it out of the ground, it doesn’t scream. I’m terribly, terribly
sorry.” And we all sighed. And laughed.
On our way back to the hotel, Ro decided
that because SHE had gotten lovely new clothes, so I needed some too. I had
seen a sweater in a shop window that I really liked, so we stopped there to try
it. I looked VAST in it, ugh. So I was ready to leave, but Ro was determined.
She made me try on just about every single thing in the “reduced” section. All
either terrible or too small. I am too big for most Italian fashion. However,
we finally found a long silk blouse in a bright watermelon pink that actually
looked really nice, and was down to 10E. Definitely a buy signal. (I have more
impetus to get super skinny now though—in the window of the next shop was a
leather jacket in brilliant purple. But as is so often the case with really high
fashion styles and colors, only comes in sizes up to medium.)
Pepe, the B&B owner, had told me that
his favorite restaurant was close by. I asked his wife this afternoon where it
was, and she gave me directions. However, when we got there at 7:40 the rather
surly looking man told me to come back at 8, too early for dinner. Ok, not
going there. But there were lots of restaurants in the piazza where this one
was, so we started to make the rounds. The first one didn’t have much on the
menu that Rose would eat. At the second one when we asked for the menu, the man
said, “uh, we don’t have a menu.” Eh? “We only serve fish. Whatever is best
from the fishermen in the morning, is what we serve for dinner.” Then he
brought out a platter of everything that they had available that night. Aurora
got very excited at the sight of the enormous shrimp (one waved at her, because
of course they were still alive), so we decided to stay. We were going to split
a pasta with shrimp then split a fish course, but that turned out to be not
enough. She wanted more shrimp, so I ordered another plate of the pasta and
figured she could have the two big shrimp and I would eat the pasta. Somewhere
along the line, however, oh you pesky language barrier, we ended up with a
plate of 4 grilled shrimp AND a plate of pasta with shrimp. I think I must have
blanched a little – the owner assured me it wasn’t very expensive, but I was
convinced we were looking at a bill of 80E when it was all over. Those things
are expensive (but AWFULLY yummy). I just about fell off my chair when the bill
arrived and it was only 50E for all that shrimp.
Off to bed early tonight, as we have an
early train to Orvieto tomorrow!
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