Fox Point Insanity: Italy 2006 Amalfi Coast

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Italy 2006 Amalfi Coast

After our two weeks in Umbria, we drove (yikes!!) all the way down to a hotel in Ravello, which is just up the hill from Amalfi, on the sensibly-named Amalfi coast. The hotel was amazing, and so were the views. We felt that, after "roughing it" in the countryside, we needed a bit of luxury to close out the vacation. Our hotel there was the Villa Cimbrone, and it was in some sort of redone castle.

Here's the doorway into the hotel, from inside the grounds looking out

And here are the hoys fooling around the entryway, this time from outside looking in

The insides of the hotel/castle were pretty nice

Here's where you could have breakfast

And here's the view you get to look at while having breakfast!

These next few pix are from the hotel grounds

The boys discovered the swimming pool, of course...

We got another tour guide, and she took us through the Roman seaside town of Herculaneum, which suffered exactly the same fate as Pompeii, but isn't quite as clogged with tourists.

Here's Mt Vesuvius, as seen from the road (A2)

Here are a couple overviews of Hurculaneum, followed by some close-ups of a couple mosaics and a painting

Then we got a tour of Napoli, which features the worst drivers in Italy. That may seem like splitting hairs, but they are actually noticeably worse there, according to our guide, Napoli is famous among Italians for bad driving!! Napoli is a bit of a dump but the historic center city is kind of fun.