On Wednesday, June 5th, we took a day trip to Paestum to see the marvelously preserved Greek ruins from 2500 years ago, and to visit a farmhouse dairy that makes buffalo milk cheeses and other products, and to see the scenery of a corner near the Amalfi Coast that we'd had to miss on our northward trek because it's inaccessible from that direction.
We started with breakfast downstairs at the hotel, and a nice surprise - Laura the breakfast lady had made a nice salad with the Tropea red onions that I had left her the preceding morning! We loved everything about our four-night stay at the Hotel Palazzo Guardati and this was just one more example of their friendliness and customer care.
From the hotel is was a two hour drive and 2500 years to classical Greece. We drove through the major city of Salerno, but we did not get into the downtown area so it looked more like Worcester from the highway. I want to return on a future trip to see Salerno and take the ferry around the Amalfi Coast to Sorrento from the south.
The town of Paestum, on the coast south of Salerno, is renowned for its fine Greek ruins. There aren't as many temples as there are at the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento, in Sicily, but two of them are in better condition and Paestum has much of the ancient town excavated so you can get a richer context and in my opinion a better experience. There's also a street adjacent to the park with dining and souvenirs, in addition to the park's own gift shop. It's easier to get to, just an hour from Pompeii and 40 minutes from the Salerno airport. It's overall a much more highly developed tourist area, and a better experience and we stayed a long time.
One of the best things about the archaeological park in Paestum is that it's wide open with well-marked paths so you can see a lot at a glance and then examine each structure in the context of its neighbors. The site was inhabited for centuries, so the oldest Greek structures were sometimes repurposed or simply renamed: the Greek temple to Poseidon (above) became the temple to Neptune under the Romans, but a portion of the Greek agora (marketplace) was completely cleared away by the Romans to be replaced with this assembly area for political gatherings in their own style of the Roman Republic.
Then we had a sort of lunch at Masseria Lupata in Paestum. I say "a sort of lunch" because the restaurant was closed when we arrived, but the shop was open and they had tables and plasticware. It was mid-afternoon and it would be difficult finding anyplace to eat, and I really wanted to sample the buffalo milk products for which Campania is famous. We bought very fresh buffalo mozzarella and some caciocavallo cheese, some buffalo milk gelato and a piece of their cheesecake, and some taralli for the road. It was all fresh and excellent. We wanted to see the cows, but they were in a field far from the road and it would have taken too much time to walk there.
We ended up driving back into Sorrento at rush hour in terrible traffic. Google Maps showed us a accident ahead with a long backup and few options, but it did show us a way along the shore. That was a wacky adventure! We had to creep down the hillside on a narrow serpentine road with abrupt turns and sometimes no visibility, and a few places where I had to pull in the side-view mirrors to squeak through. We arrived, but I wondered if's we'd have done better to stay on the main road. After all, being stuck in traffic in Sorrento is not like being stuck on Route 128; when you're stuck in traffic in Sorrento you're still in Sorrento seeing views like this one.
By evening we were back in the hotel and ready for dinner. We went across the street again to Guarracino, where I enjoyed Spaghetti alle Vongole (with tiny clams in the shell), Melissa had the local classic Gnocchi alla Sorrentina, and Lorna had the Sea Bream with Cherry Tomatoes and Basil. We had been traveling for three weeks, and we had just one full day remaining: tomorrow we'd be in Naples and then we'd fly home. We were in a reflective mood, and started recollecting all that we had seen on this fantastic adventure. That was a lot of recollecting to do, from Prague through Vienna and Salzburg and the entire Adriatic and Ionian coasts of Italy!
So we took one more pass though the shopping district. Naturally Lorna and Melissa wanted to see the Bimonte cameos again and to say farewell to Christian and Matteo. We took one more look at the pottery shops and leather goods and intarsia wood crafts, trying to remember if we could fit one more souvenir in our bags. Maybe I could jettison a pair of pants that was getting worn - it would be easier to get another pair of pants at home than that gorgeous oil bottle that I saw, with a hand-painted scene of sirens and a dragon in the bay before Vesuvius... I bought the bottle. I needed new pants anyway and now the bottle has homemade chili oil in it to liven up a lunch with spice and memories.
We stopped at a couple of places for some desserts to bring back to the hotel, where our room had a private patio. We got a couple of fresh-filled cannolli and a Delizia di Limone, one of the few Sorrentine specialties that I had yet to try.
Back on the patio we opened two wines: a freebie from the hotel in Gallipoli was grapey and not good, but the 100 Ancini from Rocco (a gift after that fabulous lunch in Puglia) was excellent. We had some cheese and taralli from Paestum, and I had some fiery 'nduja from that truckstop in Calabria, and those sweets.
The Delizie al Limone was a tasty dessert and I had every intention of making it at home sometime. It has a sweet lemony filling encased in a spongecake ball and then covered with a mild lemon icing. It's three different recipes to make and then assemble, and I could see from the one that I bought that there will be some techniques to learn, too, so I'll have to make it twice to get it right. Lorna's not a big fan of lemony desserts, so I have to think of when I will go to the effort to do all that. I reconsidered my plan to make it, and I remembered the 20 pounds of pasta that I had ordered from Pasta Somma, and all the other foodie marvels that we'd discovered, and I could sense that Delizie slipping down my list of priorities.
The next day would be a big final day culminating with an opera in Naples, so I had to get some sleep!