32 Blog Post October 5, 2024
“I think we’re on a movie set,” Alistair said to me as we walked to dinner from our hotel. The small street where we are staying in Minori, Italy has both a global feeling and a totally local feeling. As we walked, people hung out in shop doorways talking to each other loudly (I must add an editorial comment here—Italians talk really, really loud. It is not a stereotype, I promise. This is simply the way it is.) They were laughing together, clearly making some kind of joke, and then we saw three nuns stop to talk to a family and they were all smiling and laughing. In some of the windows, beautiful pastries were displayed; in others, colorful clothing. Then we got to the end of the street and the Mediterranean sea was all glimmer-gold blue under a rose tinged sky as the sun set behind the mountain. If I never come back, would you forgive me?
I have never seen a city as beautiful as this one. It’s not even big enough to be called a city—it’s really a town. And to get here from Pompei, where we started, our driver had to navigate the most incredible mountain pass road I’ve ever seen. To our right, the world dropped away into a deep valley that got deeper and deeper as we drove up the mountain. The hair pin turns on a road that barely counted as two lanes were enough to scare the most confident passenger, I would think. The only thing between that valley and us was a 2 foot high stone wall that extended all the way up the mountain. The views of Mt. Vesuvius (the volcano that caused the destruction of Pompei), and all the rest of the mountains were incredible, but what was even more astonishing to me were the farmers that grow lemons, grapes and other crops on the steep sides of the mountain that we say as we drove here. Even from our hotel room, we can look up the street and at the top of the street, the lights seem to rise up into the sky from the darkness--these are all houses/farms that cling to the side of the mountain on an ever rising backdrop to this seaside town.
As soon as we arrived, we grabbed sandwiches at a local bakery, "Pane, Amore and Fantasia", staffed by three Italian women who were fascinated by my fairy hair (capelli fata) and we then walked off those calories on the Sentierio di Limoni, or the Path of Lemons, between the neighboring towns of Minori to Maori, about 2.4 miles, but about 10,000 stairs—seriously. The path rises up from the harbor areas into the terraced lemon farms and it is the same ancient path that the women used to travel after the lemon harvest, carrying bushels of lemons to the harbors for export. Along the Path there is a beautiful ode to these women, the ‘mothers, sisters and wives” written to praise their hard work over the centuries. Now, of course, cars and trucks transport these fragrant, bright fruits to markets and ports nearby.
I have been so captured by the beauty of Minori that the incredible story of Pompei faded a bit into the background, which seems impossible. This morning, prior to our trip to Minori, we had a tour of some of the highlights of the archeological site that still sits under the shadow of the great Vesuvius, which is an active volcano. While the original city was built in the 9th century BCE, the eruption in 79 AD completely destroyed the city, but it did so in a way that miraculously preserved artifacts, homes, the impression left by people’s bodies as the ash descended. We learned that many people survived the eruption, but those who chose to stay did not. We have heard similar stories in our own time about wildfires and hurricanes. People cannot be forced to leave their home, and sometimes that choice has deadly consequences, then and now. We saw fairly modern roadways and sewage systems, and an aqueduct system that brought in water from the nearby mountains, part of which is still in use today. Archeologists are still working to uncover even more of the ancient site, and we were able to see the places where that is happening as well.
But back to Minori…perhaps you have heard of the Amalfi Coast in Italy, and you heard that it is beautiful. That is one of the great understatements. I hope that my photos and my stories help you feel more like you know this place the way I am learning about it.
One quick note—not sure how I’ll run here, which is always interesting. There simply isn’t room on the roads for an additional person and there are no flat roads, which is really what I’m looking for. Maybe I’ll have to do those crazy steps a few more times.
And then a final bit of serendipity in this remote place—laundry! We are in the habit of looking for the nearest laundromats where we stay, and as we walked home from dinner in the rain tonight, Alistair noticed a tiny launderette—just 4 machines—two doors from our hotel! We stopped in check things out and met a woman from Zimbabwe, a woman from Australia and another from Canada. Laundromats are always such great places to meet people. This felt like a God-sign to me. Clean clothes are really important, but they can be hard to come by when traveling.
In closing, a local home in Minori had this great phrase graffitied on one of its walls:
“Se non scali le montagne, non potrai mai godere del paesaggio.” Or “If you don’t climb the mountain, you can never enjoy the view.”
That feels very scriptural to me, and in addition to food and culture and history, sometimes nourishing looks deceptively like hiking up big mountains in order to catch the view from above. I feel deeply and profoundly the importance of that view from above. Today it inspired joy, hard work, gratitude and a renewed awareness of God’s creativity and graciousness.
Find beauty in the world today—go ahead, I dare you!
ML+
