Neither Here Nor There (21 page)

I had dinner at a restaurant just off the square. It was packed, but super-friendly and efficient and the food was generous and superb – ravioli in cream, a heap of scallopine alla Sorrentino, a large but simple salad and an over-ample bowl of home-made ice-cream that had tears of pleasure welling in my eye sockets.

Afterwards, as I sat bloated with a coffee and a cigarette, resting my stomach on the tabletop, an interesting thing happened. A party of eight people came in, looking rich and self-important and distinctly shady, the women in furs, the men in cashmere coats and sunglasses, and within a minute a brouhaha had erupted, sufficiently noisy to make the restaurant fall silent as everyone, customers and waiters alike, looked over.

Apparently the new arrivals had a reservation, but their table wasn’t ready – there wasn’t an empty table in the place – and they were engaged in various degrees in making a stink about it. The manager, wringing his hands, soaked up the abuse and had all his waiters dashing around like scene shifters, with chairs and tablecloths and vases of flowers, trying to assemble a makeshift table for eight in an already crowded room. The only person not actively involved in this was the head of the party, a man who looked uncannily like Adolfo Celli and stood aloof, a £500 coat draped over his shoulders. He said nothing except to make a couple of whispered observations into the ear of a pock-faced henchman, which I assumed involved concrete boots and the insertion of a dead fish in someone’s mouth.

The head waiter dashed over and bowingly reported that they had so far assembled a table for six, and hoped to have the other places shortly, but if in the meantime the ladies would care to be seated ... He touched the floor with his forehead. But this was received as a further insult. Adolfo whispered again to his henchman, who departed, presumably to get a machine gun or to drive a bulldozer through the front wall.

Just then I said, ‘Scusi’ (for my Italian was coming on a treat), ‘you can have my table. I’m just going.’ I drained my coffee, gathered my change and stood up. The manager looked as if I had saved his life, which I would like to think I may have, and the head waiter clearly thought about kissing me full on the lips but instead covered me with obsequious ‘Grazie’s’. I’ve never felt so popular. The waiters beamed and many of the other diners regarded me with, if I say it myself, a certain lasting admiration. Even Adolfo inclined his head in a tiny display of gratitude and respect. As my table was whipped away, I was escorted to the door by the manager and head waiter who bowed and thanked me and brushed my shoulders with a whisk broom and offered me their daughters’ hand in marriage or just for some hot sex. I turned at the door, hesitated for a moment, suddenly boyish and good-looking, a Hollywood smile on my face, tossed a casual wave to the room and disappeared into the evening.

Weighted down with good pasta and a sense of having brought peace to a troubled corner of Sorrento, I strolled through the warm twilight along the Corso Italia and up to the coast road to Positano, the high and twisting Via del Capo, where hotels had been hacked into the rock-face to take advantage of the commending view across the Bay of Naples. All the hotels had names that were redolent of another age – the Bel Air, the Bellevue Syrene, the Admiral, the Caravel – and looked as if they hadn’t changed a whit in forty years. I spent an hour draped over the railings at the roadside, staring transfixed across the magical sweep of bay to Vesuvius and distant Naples and, a little to the left, floating in the still sea, the islands of Procida and Ischia. Lights began to twinkle on around the bay and were matched by early-evening stars in the grainy blue sky. The air was warm and kind and had a smell of fresh-baked bread. This was as close to perfection as anything I had ever encountered.

On the distant headland overlooking the bay was the small city of Pozzuoli, a suburb of Naples and home town of Sophia Loren. The citizens of Pozzuoli enjoy the dubious distinction of living on the most geologically unstable piece of land on the planet, the terrestrial equivalent of a Vibro-Bed. They experience up to 4,000 earth tremors a year, sometimes as many as a hundred in a day. People in Pozzuoli are so used to having pieces of plaster fall into their ragù and tumbling chimney stacks knock off their grannies that they hardly notice it any more.

This whole area is like an insurance man’s worst nightmare. Earthquakes are a way of life in Calabria – Naples had one in 1980 that left 120,000 people homeless, and another even fiercer one could come at any time. It’s no wonder they worry about earthquakes. The towns are built on hills so steep that they look as if the tiniest rumble would send them sliding into the sea. And on top of that, quite literally, there’s always Vesuvius grumbling away in the background, still dangerously alive. It last erupted in 1944, which makes this its longest period of quiescence since the Middle Ages. Doesn’t sound too promising, does it?

I stared for a long time out across the water at Pozzuoli’s lights and listened intently for a low boom, like scaffolding collapsing, or the sound of the earth tearing itself apart, but there was nothing, only the mosquito buzz of an aeroplane high above, a blinking red dot moving steadily across the sky, and the soothing background hum of traffic.

In the morning I walked through bright sunshine down to the Sorrento marina along a perilously steep and gorgeous road called the Via da Maio, in the shadow of the grand Excelsior Vittoria Hotel, and took a nearly empty hover-ferry to Capri, a mountainous outcrop of green ten miles away off the western tip of the Sorrentine peninsula.

Up close, Capri didn’t look much. Around the harbour stood a dozing, unsightly collection of shops, cafés and ferry booking offices. All of them appeared to be shut, and there was not a soul about, except for a sailor with Popeye arms lazily coiling rope at the quayside. A road led steeply off up the mountain. Beside it stood a sign saying
CAPRI
6
KM
.

‘Six kilometres!’ I squeaked.

I had with me two incredibly useless guidebooks to Italy, so useless in fact that I’m not even going to dignify them by revealing their titles here, except to say that one of them should have been called
Let’s Go Get Another Guidebook
and the other was Fodor’s (I was lying a moment ago) and neither of them so much as hinted that Capri town was miles away up a vertical mountainside. They both made it sound as if all you had to do was spring off the ferry and there you were. But from the quayside Capri town looked to be somewhere up in the clouds.

The funicolare up the mountainside wasn’t running. (Natch.) I looked around for a bus or a taxi or even a donkey, but there was nothing, so I turned with a practised sigh and began the long trek up. It was a taxing climb, mollified by some attractive villas and sea views. The road snaked up the mountain in a series of long, lazy S-bends, but a mile or so along some steep and twisting steps had been hewn out of the undergrowth and they appeared to offer a more direct, if rather more precipitate, route to Capri town. I ventured up them. I have never seen such endless steps. They just went on and on. They were closed in by the whitewashed walls of villas on both sides and overhung by tumbling fragrant shrubs – highly fetching, but after about the three-hundredth step I was gasping and sweating so much that the beauty was entirely lost on me.

Because of the irregular geography of the hillside, it always looked as if the summit might be just ahead, but then I would round a turning to be confronted by another expanse of steps and yet another receding view of the town. I stumbled on, reeling from wall to wall, gasping and wheezing, shedding saliva, watched with solemn interest by three women in black coming down the steps with the day’s shopping. The only thing sustaining me was the thought that clearly I was going to be the only person tenacious enough to make the climb to Capri. Whatever lay up there was going to be mine, all mine. Eventually the houses grew closer together until they were interconnected, like blocks of Lego, and the steps became a series of steep cobbled alleyways. I passed beneath an arch and stepped out into one of the loveliest squares I have ever seen. It was packed with German and Japanese tourists. The tears streamed down my cheeks.

I got a room in the Hotel Capri. ‘Great name! How long did it take you to come up with it?’ I asked the manager, but he just gave me that look of studied disdain that European hotel managers reserve for American tourists and other insects. I don’t know why he was so snooty because it wasn’t a great hotel. It didn’t even have a bellboy, so the manager had to show me to my room himself, though he left me to deal with my baggage. We went up a grand staircase, where two workmen were busy dribbling a nice shade of ochre on the marble steps and occasionally putting some of it on the wall, to a tiny room on the third floor. As he was the manager, I wasn’t sure whether to give him a tip, as I would a bellboy, or whether this would be an insult to his lofty position. In the event, I settled on what I thought was an intelligent compromise. I tipped him, but I made it a very small tip. He looked at it as if I had dropped a ball of lint into his palm, leading me to conclude that perhaps I had misjudged the situation. ‘Maybe you’ll laugh at my jokes next time,’ I remarked cheerfully, under my breath, as I shut the door on him.

Capri town was gorgeous, an infinitely charming little place of villas and tiny lemon groves and long views across the bay to Naples and Vesuvius. The heart of the town was a small square, the Piazza Umberto I, lined with cream-coloured buildings and filled with tables and wicker chairs from the cafés ranged around it. At one end, up some wide steps, stood an old church, dignified and white, and at the other was a railinged terrace with an open view to the sea far below.

I cannot recall a more beguiling place for walking. The town consisted almost entirely of a complex network of white-walled lanes and passageways, many of them barely wider than your shoulders, and all of them interconnected in a wonderfully bewildering fashion, so that I would constantly find myself returning unexpectedly to a spot I had departed from in an opposing direction ten minutes before. Every few yards an iron gate would be set in the wall and through it I could glimpse a white cottage in a jungle of flowery shrubs and, usually, a quarry-tiled terrace over-looking the sea. Every few yards a cross-passageway would plunge off down the hillside or a set of steps would climb half-way to the clouds to a scattering of villas high above. I wanted every house I saw.

There were no roads at all, apart from the one leading from the harbour to the town and onward to Anacapri, on the far side of the island. Everywhere else had to be got to on foot, often after an arduous trek. Capri must be the worst place in the world to be a washing-machine delivery man.

Most of the shops lay beyond the church, up the steps from the central piazza
,
in yet another series of lanes and little squares of unutterable charm. They all had names like Gucci and Yves St Laurent, which suggested that the summertime habitués must be rich and insufferable, but mercifully most of the shops were still not open for the season, and there was no sign of the yachting-capped assholes and bejewelled crinkly women who must make them prosper in the summer.

A few of the lanes were enclosed, like catacombs, with the upper storeys of the houses completely covering the passageways. I followed one of these lanes now as it wandered upward through the town and finally opened again to the sky in a neighbourhood where the villas began to grow larger and enjoy more spacious grounds. The path meandered and climbed, so much so that I grew breathless again and propelled myself onwards by pushing my hands against my knees, but the scenery and setting were so fabulous that I was dragged on, as if by magnets. Near the top of the hillside the path levelled out and ran through a grove of pine trees, heavy with the smell of rising sap. On one side of the path were grand villas – I couldn’t imagine by what method they got the furniture there when people moved in or out – and on the other was a giddying view of the island: white villas strewn across the hillsides, half buried in hibiscus and bougainvillaea and a hundred other types of shrub.

It was nearly dusk. A couple of hundred yards further on the path rounded a bend through the trees and ended suddenly, breathtakingly, in a viewing platform hanging out over a precipice of rock – a little patio in the sky. It was a look-out built for the public, but I had the feeling that no one had been there for years, certainly no tourist. It was the sheerest stroke of luck that I had stumbled on it. I have never seen anything half as beautiful: on one side the town of Capri spilling down the hillside, on the other the twinkling lights of the cove at Anacapri and the houses gathered around it, and in front of me a sheer drop of – what? – 200 feet, 300 feet, to a sea of the lushest aquamarine washing against outcrops of jagged rock. The sea was so far below that the sound of breaking waves reached me as the faintest of whispers. A sliver of moon, brilliantly white, hung in a pale blue evening sky, a warm breeze teased my hair and everywhere there was the scent of lemon, honeysuckle and pine. It was like being in the household-products section of Sainsbury’s. Ahead of me there was nothing but open sea, calm and seductive, for 150 miles to Sicily. I would do anything to own that view, anything. I would sell my mother to Robert Maxwell for it. I would renounce my citizenship and walk across fire. I would swap hair – yes! – with Andrew Neil.

Just above me, I realized after a moment, overlooking this secret place was the patio of a villa set back just out of sight. Somebody
did
own that view, could sit there every morning with his muesli and orange juice, in his Yves St Laurent bathrobe and Gucci slippers, and look out on this sweep of Mediterranean heaven. It occurred to me that it probably was owned by Donald Trump, or the Italian equivalent, some guy who only uses it for about two minutes a decade and then is too busy making deals and screwing people by telephone to notice the view. Isn’t it strange how wealth is always wasted on the rich? And with this discouraging thought I returned to the town.