Florence to Sorrento Day 11 - 24th February 2016

Transport day! We have the art of throwing everything into our suitcases down pat now. It helps that the only souvenirs we have picked up have been magnets or similarly small in size. Our bags were waiting and packed for us to leave at 8.30, once the laundry we had left our clothes at opened. We had discovered it was actually a lot cheaper to use a professional laundry service we found nearby rather than the coin machines. It cost us only €6 to get 5kg worth of laundry washed, dried and folded, which was half the price it cost us in Venice to use the machines.

Once the clean laundry had been squashed into our bags we began the slow journey to the train station. Florence's stone streets are beautiful until you're hauling 15kg behind you on weak, spindly wheels. To break it up we stopped into the Mercato Food Market on our way to S M Novella. The markets smelt strongly of fish and cured meats, as people wheeled about trolleys full of fresh produce. We wandered through for about 10 minutes before reluctantly finishing our walk to the train station.

Our destination today was Sorrento. We took a train for 2 1/2 hours from Florence to Naples, where we had to swap over onto the Circumvesuviana train to Sorrento. The Circumvesuviana was cheap at €3.60 per person. It was a rather...shall I say, unique, experience. The hour long trip was bumpy enough to pass as a ride in an amusement park, dirtier than a public toilet and had no running air-conditioning - instead having small windows above the seats that opened to let air into the stale carriage. In winter the lack of fresh air saw me removing all my layers, so I'm not sure how people get along during Summer. Even in Winter the train was quite crowded, so we moved off to a corner near the back of the last carriage so we could stand with out bags. The platforms in Naples had been heavily sign-posted with warnings about pickpockets on the trains, and from our corner we could watch as the shadier individuals on the carriage worked their way through the train looking for anything unsecured, an open pocket, or someone sleeping for them to rob. We kept our eyes closely trained on a man who had started off standing weirdly close by to us, and who had then proceeded to move into different seats on the train every few minutes. 

We survived the bumpy, loud and rattly journey to arrive in Sorrento in the mid-afternoon. We left the station to feel warm rays of sun land across our cheeks, streaming from bright blue skies. On such a warm day (about 19°) we wasted no time after check-in at our hotel on getting back out into the sunny streets of Sorrento. 

It was such a lovely temperature that Hugh and I decided it would be a great day for a small hike. A quick google search revealed that the Bagni Della Regina Giovanna ruins were about 3km to the south of Sorrento.

Walking shoes on, we mapped our route to the ruins. The route we took was along the Via Capo, a road that ran along the cliff side, overlooking the ocean. Just after leaving Sorrento we looked back to some sweeping views of the Bay of Naples and Mt. Vesuvius, the peak of which was occluded by some low-hanging clouds.

The Traversa Punta Capo - yep, cars fit down there!

It wasn't long before the tiny footpath we had been on disappeared altogether and we were walking on the twisting road next to fast scooters and buses of tourists. We took it slowly at the bends and corners, as neither Hugh nor I had really planned on getting hit and killed by a speeding car this early on in our honeymoon. Soon we veered off onto the Traversa Punta Capo, and I think we both let out a sigh of relief that we had made it alive through the crazy Italian traffic on such a winding road with no pedestrian footpath. At the end of the Traversa Punta Capo a stone-walled laneway opened up, and we followed this down. The laneway was quite steep downhill. Occasionally we would pass an open gate, where we could poke our heads in to glimpse the worlds of the local farmers, envious of the beauty that they lived in every day. 

The entrance to Traversa Punta Capo

Near the bottom of the laneway, as the path somehow get even steeper, I had to stop to treat a low blood sugar caused by all the walking. Hugh went on ahead to see the ruins as I recovered my energy for the steep climb back up. The sun was dipping lower in the sky so we had to hustle back up the hill. We did not want to be walking along the Via Capo in the dark. About halfway back up the laneway we heard a car rumbling behind us. It took up the entire width of the lane, and there was no where for us to go to get out of the way. About 30 metres up we could see where the wall dipped a little lower, so we hastened to reach there before the car reached us. We scrambled up the wall, our legs hanging above the car as it passed below us.

We arrived back into Sorrento as the sky darkened. 

The view of Sorrento from Via Capo

Being so near to the home of Pizza we stopped into a Michelen starred pizza restaurant for dinner, where I had the best salami pizza of my life. When you order pizza in Italy, you are expected to eat an entire pizza to yourself, something I thought was not possible. The pizza was so good, that even though I felt full mid-way through the meal, my taste buds insisted that I kept eating. 

With the weather so warm, we decided to end the day with some creamy gelato, served by a young man who informed us that he would be picking our flavours because he liked to size up customers and guess their tastes.