Our Week in Italy (Part One)

Here we are, with our traveling companions, having a glass of wine, last week in Sorrento. You can see that the sun was bright and the sky was blue. (That's me on the right, shading my eyes.) Sorrento is in Southern Italy, on the Gulf of Naples. Everywhere you look there are sea views:




And motorcycles:


And lemon trees:


And buildings perched on hills:




We traveled with two couples, friends from Philadelphia. Every night we tried the local food in a different restaurant. Here are we, the three women in the group (that's me in the purple).



And here are our husbands... watching a soccer game (romantic devils!).


Fruit vendors with their carts, selling lemons, oranges, and artichokes. Some of the lemons are as big as footballs!


And little Tweetie vendors, too:


Everything is on a hill. I took this photo while I was standing on one street, looking down on another street. All the sidewalks are very narrow, so that we had to walk in a single file most of the time, with little cars and motor cycles whizzing past us, inches away. Wow! That took some getting used to!


Every night, when we returned to our hotel, we toasted ourselves at this little bar for surviving the streets and the hills.


Our hotel is owned and run by a family with an Italian husband and a French wife, their adult children, brothers, sisters, and uncles. Every worker in the hotel is a family member, and they made us feel like family too. They were gracious, charming and helpful. At breakfast our first morning, I broke a front tooth. The hotel owner called their dentist and made me an appointment. They drove me there, waited while the tooth was fixed, then brought me back to the hotel.

This post is about our visit in Sorrento. During the week, we also visited Pompeii, and drove the Amalfi Coast to Positano, and took a ferry to the island of Capri. More about those in posts to come!