HIGH ON THE ITALIAN COAST

On my way to Puglia along the Cilento Coast to the fabulous hotel of the Convento di Santa Maria di Costantinopoli in Puglia, I turned off the autoroute south, direction Castellabate.

There is a lot of “belvedere” in this part of the world, but no American guidebooks that I have seen mention anything further south deom Salerno until they get to Sicily. But, believe me when I say that the bit that sticks out into the Mar Tirreno past the Gulf of Salerno, is worth the trip and a stop, to use that old Michelin dipstick.

That was obvious when I saw the kitchen of the monastery of San Lorenzo. 

How the poverty-vowed Franciscans got their hands on the cash to build this not so little version of the Vatican kitchen I don’t know either.

What is clear is that they loved to eat. 

The kitchen is big enough to be St. Peter’s. Perhaps those renaissance painters of Rome wouldn’t have had the stomach to paint a gory version of the crucifixion right above the butchering table. Or a gloomy version of Christ’s entombment around the twenty-foot wide and three-story high marble hood above the stoves.

After all, it’s just cooking.

Past Paestum it takes a strong stomach to get past the patrols of North African hookers of both sexes and their Sicilian protectors. And then past the odoriferously-ripe roadside farms of lactating water buffalo.

One of the main attractions of taking that route was to taste hour-old mozzarella. But the cheese stall along the road interspersed with flesh for sale and the smells of lactating buffalo, I didn’t stop.

Regrettably.

But soon pestilence gave way to palm trees and the next thing I saw was the sign telling me to turn left at the base of a seemingly endless cliff face. Up to my destination for the night in Castellabate.

First gear for the next fifteen minutes hauled the car up to a niche of a parking space so high that even the martins and swallows were flying 100 feet below.

A pair of kestrels swooped in to take a look.

I looked up to find the red railing of the little rented villa perched up where only raptors flew until the hawks left and the martins and swallows arrived en masse, doing their version of the Mille Miglia race around the villa in tight, shrieking, circles.

Obviously, they had a head for heights, but I didn’t, at least not without a cocktail. Nothing for it but a dizzying walk even higher up to the village itself, which at 800 years is one of the oldest constantly-inhabited in the world. 

I found a restaurant with umbrella-covered tables outside and a view so vast that it might have been all the view in the world.