A slice of LEMON HEAVEN
Penny Smith is smitten by the pastel perfect Amalfi Coast – and the local speciality you just can’t escape
IF YOU suffer from vert i go, hate l emons and think pizzas are overrated, jog on. If, however, you like pastel-coloured towns t u mbli n g d o wn steep banks to the sea, can’t get enough of limoncello and think heaven on earth comes on a thin crust with a whiff of cheese, let me introduce you to the Amalfi Coast.
It’s a whisker down the map from Naples and is exactly the right amount of flying hours from Britain to get in a light lunch on the plane without bolting your food or spilling your wine.
It also includes such extraordinary historical sites as Pompeii – destroyed in a volcanic eruption in 79 AD – with its chilling plaster moulds of suffocated volcano victims. No sooner have I unpacked my stretchy trousers to allow for the expected unfettered pasta consumption than we are off with our guide Vincenzo for a trundle round the ruins in the sunshine.
‘ When Vesuvius erupted,’ he waves at what’s left of the crater, ‘huge amounts of people left. But the rich people and their slaves stayed because they had too much stuff to move. The rocks from the eruption broke the terracotta roof tiles. Then the ash rained down. It was a miserable day,’ he says with understatement, ‘And it got worse. Many suffocated.’
But this isn’t simply about a decimated town. This is a snapshot of life at that time. There is exemplary plumbing, one way signs involving donkeys and instead of a tacked up bit of wood saying Beware Of The Dog, a beautiful mosaic spelling out ‘CAVE CANEM’.
We turn a corner and there is the red-light district.
‘It is here that schoolchildren stop blowing bubbles with gum and start listening to me,’ says Vincenzo as he points to the selection of faded murals demonstrating what’s on offer. This section is awash with phalluses both painted and sculpted.
If you need to rest your eyeballs on something less salacious, there’s the pretty town of Sorrento. On every corner sprouts a statue, a church, a bar or a picturesque shop selling a cornucopia of citrus based items. Jane, our new tour guide, says: ‘Essentially, if you can make something with a lemon, you can find it here.’
Talking of which, Emiliana, a third- generation limoncello producer in Minori, down on the coast, can teach you how to make the stuff. It’s basically lemons, sugar and alcohol. ‘Using the same pro- cess you can do mandarin, wild fennel, liquorice, walnuts,’ she says.
‘Or you could just drink the grain alcohol and lie down for a bit,’ says the other half as I wield the peeler.
This is our first experience of the world of escorted touring so it’s with slight trepidation that we take the coach trip to Amalfi. But we needn’t have worried. Jane gives us a talk as we drive and no sooner are we dropped off than we all disappear in different directions. I pootle round the Museum of the Navigator’s Compass – if only because it sounds like the next book from Philip Pullman.
And talking of books – specifically paper – there is a Paper Mill Museum in Amalfi, where Maddalena demonstrates how t o make paper from cloth. ‘They would use rabbit fat in the process to make it smooth and suitable for writing,’ she says. I buy a pad of the rough stuff.
And so we go on to Ravello. ‘This is like an Escher drawing,’ says the chap carrying my various purchases. ‘ Endless steps. All of them seeming to meet up on the same plane but leaving me with a severe case of lemony rickets.’
It’s a stunning hill-top town full of shady spots and spar- kling views of t he sea which inspired Wagner to write some of Parsifal here, E. M. Forster to write A Room With A View, Ibsen to write A Doll’s House and me to write a small postcard extolling the virtues of comfortable shoes and a stretchy pair of slacks.
We stayed at the family-run Hotel Villa Romana in Minori and there’s a path not far from the hotel – you’ll be surprised and confounded here – called The Lemon Trail. It goes from Minori to Maiori.
‘Pub quiz fact,’ says the man with the buckled knees. ‘There are more steps coming back than going.’
I haven’t not done Mastermind for nothing. It takes about half an hour before my speedy response. ‘ Did you deliberately omit the word “up”?’ I ask eventually, showing my working out on a rough piece of non-rabbit-fat paper.
There are so many options for excursions that you can end up with no time to thoroughly relax with a glass of wine. Which means that one excellent solution is to go to a vineyard, find out how they squash the grapes into the bottle and have a few nibbles. They do this at the Cantine Apicella.
I am obviously tooled up with pen and paper but, unfortunately, I appear not to have started writing until I have sampled some of the results of the fermentation process.
All I can tell you is that I seem to have particularly enjoyed the Piedirosso, the Tramonti grapes and a delicious ricotta and honey item. I know I slept well.
THE trip is over too soon and so bearing in mind t hat you have to see Naples and die, we go to Naples. I think we may have accidentally strayed into the seedier part. It doesn’t help that it’s raining and there’s either a public holiday or they’ve emptied the whole of Umbria into the city. But it does help that we find a busy restaurant where we eat some of the most delicious pasta known to woman.
With trousers at full stretch, I gather up my lemon produce and my handmade piece of cloth paper and head for the airport.
Sophia Loren, now an honorary citizen of Naples, always claimed her curves were down to a diet of pasta. ‘Everything you see, I owe to spaghetti,’ she said.
Weirdly, I need a bigger dress.