THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 26, 1994 TAG: 9406240092
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JOSEPH P. COSCO, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940626 LENGTH: Long
Jesus may have stopped here and gone no further south, but not us. We would push on after a pit stop and some snacks at a lonely highway service area just up ahead, not far from another in the endless string of tunnels through which we had coursed that day.
{REST} We had begun with naive hopes of making it all the way from Pompeii to my native village of San Giovanni d'Albi for my first visit in 21 years and the first ever for my wife, Kathleen, and daughter, Marisa. But our plans had been waylaid by the Italian road, with all its frustrations and joys, roadblocks and endless vistas, perils and rewards.
It started hailing marbles as we pulled into the service area. Inside the shop, dark wiry men (the sons of brigands who had once roamed these mountains?) milled about, silent and sullen as the surrounding mountains. We didn't linger.
At the other end of the long tunnel, we were welcomed to Calabria and, now, a shower of sleet. Was this lunar landscape what I had brought my wife and child all the way to southern Italy to see? And how to assure them that somewhere up ahead we would find a hotel - yes, with bath - in this wild remote land? I had dragged my wife and daughter south to the mezzogiorno, off the beaten tourist path, there to see where I was born and the relatives who had been left behind. But it had been one heck of an up-and-down day on the Italian road literally and emotionally. Now it was going downhill fast - figuratively.
We would try the Morano Calabro/Castrovillari exit some dozen miles away. Still, I had visions of having to drive all the way to Cosenza half-blinded by darkness, mist, hail, sleet or snow - and my own crummy night vision. Sunny Italy for Easter? Hardly.
Relatives and friends had told us we were crazy to drive in Italy, and several times that day and other days I thought maybe they were right.
Motoring in Italy is an expensive, chaotic, occasionally harrowing and sometimes downright foolhardy experience.
The best deal I could find on a rental car was Europe by Car, which offered a sprightly Renault Clio for two weeks all-inclusive, including mandatory theft insurance, for $600.
Gas was a buck a liter, or about $5 a gallon, and gas stations, other than those at highway service areas, were hit and miss, just as likely to be closed as open, what with afternoon siestas and Italy's penchant for irregular business hours.
I really missed out leaving Florence on Easter Monday, a holiday. After passing a string of deserted stations, I found a busy, fully automated filling station where you feeds your lira and gets your gas - usually. My pump forgot to tell me it was taking the holiday off before it ingested 20,000 lira ($12.50). The machine did give me a credit slip, and I foolishly tried to redeem it at a station south of Assisi that sold the same brand of gas. The attendant looked at me like I was from another planet. Italian gas stations had this knack for making me look foolish and helpless.
Cities, too, had a way of bringing me to my knees. Arriving in cities was always a great adventure, with frustration and blood pressure rising to dangerous levels. We never seemed to have a good enough map, but I doubt any cartographer could clearly and adequately represent the driving pitfalls of these old cities. Consequently, we wandered through Siena, Florence, Assisi and Rome, terrorized by swarms of Vespas, before we could find our hotels.
In town, we only used the car once, to drive to a cousin's house for dinner in the suburbs of Rome. We somehow found the place with little more than a map that ended at the Vatican, a few street names provided by my cousin, and at least a dozen stops to ask directions. Mercifully, for the ride back in the dark, two of my cousin's police friends gave us a safe, if less than efficient escort back to our hotel on the Via Veneto.
Parking was usually at a premium. We lucked out in Positano, a trendy quaint town on the Amalfi Coast. Our hotel, the Villa delle Palme, offered limited free parking, along with a room with a balcony view, breakfast and a friendly proprietor who sang Neapolitan songs with gusto, all for $70. It was a different story in Rome, where the Flora Hotel parked my car in a garage that charged me close to $50 for three days, even though I left the car on the street, in what turned out to be a taxi stand, the night we visited my cousin.
Traffic wasn't as bad as I had expected, but the trip up to Assisi on its mountain perch was a nightmare of rush-hour proportions, as we and what seemed like the rest of Italy and Europe tried to visit the holy city on Easter Monday. But the stone-and-flower charm of the city, the Basilica of San Francesco with its Giotto frescoes, and the panorama of the Umbrian plain from atop the Rocca Maggiore medieval castle made up for all the aggravation.
There always seemed to be rewards on or at the end of the Italian road.
Now, as we approached the Morano Calabro/Castrovillari exit in the gathering gloom of night, the only reward we sought was a clean bed and maybe a bite to eat.
We had made a late 2 p.m. departure from the dusty deadness of Pompeii (the archeological site, not the modern town, which is a lively, gritty, car-infested place where crowds mill in the piazza late into the night), and headed south for Salerno, still hopeful of making it to San Giovanni before dusk.
The highway had run smooth and easy until we rounded a hill and there, hundreds of feet below us, was the Golfo di Salerno, whose beauty is second only to that of nearby bay of Naples.
An awesome view, but one I was in no position to appreciate or even sneak a peak at. For, much to the detriment of my fear of heights, we were now soaring high above Salerno on a narrow, curving skyway that seemed made from a Brobdingnagian Erector set. The flimsy-looking guardrails and impatient Italians zooming by in Mercedes and BMWs froze my hands to the steering wheel and my eyes to the road.
Just as vertigo was threatening, we were back on solid ground, descending toward Battipaglia, a coastal town where billboards advertised the local specialty, fresh mozzarrella made from buffalo milk, a delicacy which we consumed like bon-bons in our peregrinations through Italy.
Taking a tip from ``The Harper Independent Traveller'' guide to Southern Italy,'' we had decided to take the coast-hugging Autostrada del Sole to Calabria. It was a good two-lane for quite a while, but then we entered the Twilight Zone in the hills around the Golfo di Policastro.
We were curving down a hill when in short order a gaping cave-in forced me to swerve into the other lane and the road turned into a narrow mountain track that led us on a marvelous detour through an up-and-down land of weirdly shaped hills and mountains and sleepy little villages. I was thoroughly enjoying the switchbacks and views, boasting that the word ``lost'' wasn't in my vocabulary, but my wife - not a Mountain Woman - was getting nauseated and praying to the patron saint of lost things, including motorists, to get us back on track.
It wasn't until Sapri, a small seaside resort, that we came down out of the mountains. We probably should have just found a room in Sapri (We could have said we stayed in Sapri, if not Capri), but we pushed on and soon found ourselves on a coast road that made California's seem like a Sunday drive on a country lane.
Vertical cliffs rising farther than you could see on the inside, a road carved from rock clinging to the cliff, and a sheer drop of hundreds of feet into the sea just outside stone guardrails. This twisting and turning went on for about 20 miles before we arrived at Praia a Mare and the first exit off this Autostrada del Sole.
I was a basket case. It had been an awe-inspiring drive, but not one for the faint-hearted.
A little bit of backtracking brought us to the real autostrada that runs through the interior, high in the mountains. And it was those mountains that surrounded us as, now in darkness, we turned onto the exit for Morano Calabro-Castrovillari, looking for a bed.
If the car was a mechanical albatross in the cities, it gave us the freedom to rove in the countryside. It must be said that Italian roads are quite good, despite sometimes following paths fit only for mules and goats. Italy has such wonderful landscapes that even the superhighways make for interesting, if sometimes expensive, drives. My daughter especially liked the highway Auto Grills at the service areas, where the display cases were filled with sandwiches stuffed with salami, cured ham, chicken cutlets and eggplant, all for two or three bucks. After time on the road, I was thankful for the thimbleful of high-octane expresso coffee the grills served up in mass quantities.
Italy's secondary roads are rather chintzy on signs, but they take you wonderful places. The S222 from Siena to Florence rambled through the heart of Chianti country, an enchanting land of terraced vineyards and hills and promontories topped with villages, abbeys and ruined castles. The corniche drive around the Amalfi Coast, with its cliff-dwelling resort villages, taxes the driver but wasn't nearly as frightening as the coast road around Policastro. And the road south of Assisi was a pleasant, unhurried stroll through pretty hill country.
Much of the fun came from some miscalculation that really put us off the beaten track.
I (if not my wife) enjoyed the mountain roads we meandered near San Giovanni, trying to find my tiny native village which didn't merit a speck on our Michelin map. After much bumbling about, so near and yet so far from our destination, we found ourselves in another tiny village from where we could look across a steep valley and see San Giovanni on its hillside. But the only street that seemed to go through the village and on to San Giovanni was being repaired and unpassable. I had visions of having to turn back up the mountain, back to the uncharted regions where we had seen snow on the ground, there to do another hour of wandering. Feeling like an idiot, I asked a guy for help. The man mumbled something about a piazza, and then motioned for me to follow. Unable to turn the car, I followed in reverse some 20 yards to a village square the size of a small bathroom. Sure enough, a tiny street went off to the left, leading us to San Giovanni, and the bosom of my family.
But the night before we had been looking for the bosom of a bed - any bed - as we got on the Morano Calabro-Castrovillari exit.
The road came to a T. To the left, out of sight, was Castrovillari, what appeared to be a decent burgh on the map. To the right, in the darkness, lay Morano Calabro, where in the distance we could see the outlines of a somber town carved into a mountainside. It was toward Morano that we turned. It seemed a doleful place, and before we could enter its sleepy labyrinths, my wife ordered me to turn around for Castrovillari, not knowing how far off it might be.
It wasn't long, though, before we saw signs of life, even a motel, a real motel, on the city's outskirts. Buoyed, we pressed on for the centro, hoping for better in town. And soon we were in downtown Castrovillari, West Berlin to Morano's East Berlin, before the Wall fell. Here were people on the street, a handful of hotels, some eateries, and even a Benetton.
We settled on the Hotel L'Unione, which offered not only a clean, commodious, perhaps too bright room and bath, but a lobby lizard downstairs who correctly pegged me as a dead-give-away Calabrese and not some Pakistani or Mexican, for which I had been mistaken by some other Italians. Bags unloaded, we walked directly to a welcoming sign we'd seen on our way in: La Pizzeria Cavalieri.
We looked like hell, probably smelled, but you'd never have guessed it from the reception blessed on us by the elegant elderly fellow in white dinner jacket who took our coats. There was a fire blazing in a fireplace and white linen on the tables. The place had only a few other diners, but a steady stream of people came for take-out pizza.
We began with an antipasto the likes of which I have never seen, not even at childhood Christmas dinners with the gathered family. Our gracious waiter brought a mound of thick-crusted bread, a basket of salamis and cured hams from which we cut slices to our heart's content, fresh mozzarella, olives, artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes in oil, and a fritata. We gorged on the antipasto and then went at our individual pizzas from the inside out, being sure to leave an unbroken ring of crust, a la moda italiana. I polished off the wine, and mentally toasted the Italian road, the road that had brought us to Castrovillari for the night. by CNB