The Hotel Soleluna is a lovely place out of the busy throughfare in Piano di Sorrento but with easy access to its more famous sister Sorrento. More important, it has easy access to an excellent restaurant and it had a really good breakfast in the morning. But it didn't take us long to head into Sorrento! I think until you have been to Sorrento, you can't understand why the song Torna a Surriento has meaning to so many people.
We were staying at the swanky Grand Hotel de la Ville, one of the finest hotels in Sorrento. Two nights for three of us cost over $1000! It has valet parking and a laundry service, and it's a short walk through a lemon grove (owned by a limoncello maker) to the downtown shopping district - three practical benefits that we required. It also has creature comforts: a rooftop pool with an unparalleled view, a fancy restaurant and a garden restaurant, and a whole separate vegetarian menu. But they botched our fine dinner. What might have been a sublime experience was another exercise in mediocrity. We'll get to that at the end of the first day's adventures.
Lorna and I had been to Sorrento three years earlier, and she fell in love with it for many reasons, but the biggest reason is Bimonte Jewellers.
The Bimonte family has been carving cameos by hand in Sorrento for a long time. They don't just make the little lady's profile rings and pendants that you usually see; on our first visit Lorna got a ring depicting cupid on a rearing horse, since then she's bought or received as gifts a lion, a hummingbird, a "lady in the wind", a coral-and-onyx ladybug, a turquoise cupid, and more. She's a Bimonte addict. It's quite concerning, but it makes Christmas shopping easy, especially with their excellent website and the attentive service of Christian Bimonte.
While Lorna and Melissa impatiently waited for the charming and attentive Christian to finish being charming and attentive to a lovely family of six from Ohio, I indulged in one of my favorite Sorrento pastimes: I was across the street enjoying some local sardines and a local white wine, and chatting with a total stranger.
The sardines were delightful, of course, as was the wine, and the company was charming (a business woman from Hawaii visiting Sorrento for the first time, with time and money to spend). Before long the sardines were gone and the women were still shopping, so I got some more wine. I could have had a salad, steak, and dessert while they shopped at Bimonte!
Eventually the Hawaiian lady moved on and a lady from Kentucky sat down. Then two ladies from Turkey. Then that family of six from Ohio, showing off their fine new cameos. Then a jocular German who said a lot that I didn't understand, but three bottles of wine into the game we were just having fun!
No, not really, But they did shop for an extended period, so I went exploring.
Sorrento is a shopper's paradise. I'm not much of a shopper myself, but I have this on good authority. I can say that there's plenty of leather goods, inlaid wood, clothing, produce, and all sorts of nice things, but no cheap electronics or fake designer colognes. Lots of limoncello, too - like everyone and her sister makes the stuff.
Eventually we returned to the hotel, exhausted. They were hungry, having foolishly spent every moment shopping while I fueled my corpus with sardines and wine and finer things.
Fortunately the hotel has a fine restaurant with its own vegetarian menu.
Recall that Melissa is a vegetarian, hitherto forced to peruse every menu in this wonderful land where fin-fish and shellfish count as eating your vegetables. Now we're at a five-star hotel with a whole separate menu for vegetarians! We can all dine without care at this swanky place. Note the tuxedo-clad waiters carrying trays with silver-plated domes under which lie mysteries we'll never know! The restaurant is called L'Altea.
I ordered a Taurasi wine, a local wine of the third great grape of Italy: everyone knows about the Nebbiolo of Barolo fame, and the celebrated Sangiovesi that reaches its sublime and ethereal peak in the Chianti Classico Riserva, but has a softer, more voluptuous sister peak in the ineffable Brunello di Montalcino. The Aglianico grape has all the great characteristics of a wine grape, without the marketing muscle of its better capitalized northern brethren. The Taurasi rewards exploration, if you can find it! I haven't seen it in New England outside of the North End.
But all that Aglianico greatness needs to breathe. You can't just open a bottle of this precious elixir and expect it to gasp once and roar into life.
But of course! This is a classy joint - so they naturally have a decanter and decant the wine properly.
Here's a picture of some fine inlaid wood art from an old father-and-son outfit, another classic of Sorrento. It has nothing to do with this dinner, but it's something to look at while I get to the point.
We didn't need a really fancy dinner. We'd had that in Siena, but for now we wanted a relaxing experience worthy of our elegant surroundings. We had a very fine wine properly decanted, so everything else should follow naturally from there. Our expectations had been set by the great menu, the fine linens, the silverplate, and the handsome waiters.
It didn't work out that way. I don't mean to flog these unfortunates beyond what they deserve. This is a case of getting off on the wrong foot, and never recovering.
What we wanted was simple:
- That Taurasi, properly decanted.
- A shared appetizer of ravioli
- Three entrees, with some unexceptional requests of the "sauce on the side" variety.
- Two desserts and a digestivo or maybe a limoncello from a selection of local products.
In a comedy of errors, they brought out three great silver-plated domes under which were the appetizer along with my entree and Melissa's entree, leaving Lorna waiting.
I explained that we had wanted the appetizer first, and the three entrees together afterward. Their English was good and those are the terms used on the menu. It was too late to do anything about the delivered entrees, so a server scurried back and returned with Lorna's dinner, leaving us with a full table and a very rushed experience. The beef that I had carefully selected to go with the Taurasi looked like something from the Miss Worcester Diner, a letdown after that gleaming dome!
In general the food was good, but not up to expectations (which were not stratospheric, just in line with the prices.) The contrast between the elegant setting and the mundane dinner made it more of a disappointment than it had to be. The hotel did give us a modest credit, but even that transaction took the luster off what had been a celebratory experience.
Friday, 29 June worked out much better. We explored Sorrento all day and finished with a spectacular dinner.
Toward lunchtime, we took a walk up to the Hotel La Badia, where we had stayed on our first visit. Along the way, purely by chance, we got the best pizza ever at a little hole-in-the-wall called Sweet Dreams.
The Hotel La Badia is a thoroughly beautiful place, surrounded by gardens and with great views of the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. I'd been unable to get reservations there for this trip, but if we return to Sorrento, I fully intend to stay there again. Even the walk up the hill is like a walk through the Garden of Eden, with wildflowers everywhere. The photo here is of a waste area along the roadside!
Christian Bimonte had told me of an interesting historic site nearby called the Bagno della Regina Giovanna (the bath of Queen Joan), so we went there to continue our explorations.
It was an expensive cab right to the site entrance, followed by a long, long walk down hill in the blazing sun, but eventually we came to a flatter area on which the Queen's summer house had been built a thousand years ago on a point with views of Sorrento and the Isle of Capri. Further down through the trees is the sea-side grotto for which the place is named. It was enchanting! Like something out of a fairy tale. I was sure I saw nymphs frolicking in the water, but Lorna says they were just local girls in bikinis.
It seemed like a much longer walk back up the hill in that blazing sun, but the view had been worth it. We saved about 30 euros by taking a local bus back to town.
While exploring the maze of shops and restaurants earlier in the day, I had discovered the 86 Bistro. The main part of the menu was a fine platter of fresh fish on ice, including two black lobsters (you can see one in the photo, under the big crab). I had to investigate, so I talked to Salvatore the restaurauteur for a little while and, satisfied at his knowledge, I made reservations for dinner that evening.
The incredible dinner at 86 Bistro was expensive enough to be totally superlative, and it was! I have a separate post about the Black Lobsters here. We also had the most amazing assortment of local shellfish and fin-fish, just a part of which is shown here. There was razor clam and octopus (two different preparations) and shrimp and swordfish and mussels and little clams and more.
The lobster was prepared in their traditional way, with spaghetti. Once cooked it turned red just like our own, and it tasted much like our own New England lobster, except for the herbs and tomato of the dish. That is to say, I think I could reproduce the dish with a New England lobster and it would taste about the same. That's an improvement over the Spiny Lobsters, which we had in Genoa and found disappointing.
We also had another Aglianico wine, this one a Terra d'Eclano from Irpinia, in the mountains northeast of Naples. Salvatore decanted it for us before we arrived so it was ready when we dined. All in all it was an expensive but most satisfactory and locavore feast!
In the morning we had the car brought around to the front of the hotel (I felt like a real swell!). We managed to squeeze our way out of Sorrento and headed for Calabria and the toe of the boot.