Having been married a good many years, the only time my wife and I hold hands with any meaning now is negotiating very exposed and very vertiginous cliffs with sheer drops.
Along old mule tracks cut into rock faces overhanging crashing waves, your partner becomes less of a soulmate and more of a handrail. And an essential rather than significant other.
Love is…not letting your partner plunge to his or her death into a machair chasm or execute an acccidental backward bellyflop with half-pike and gainer into the Tyrhennian. At a certain age, the definition of a great holiday is not coming home freight.
Italy’s I Sentiero degli dei (Path of the Gods) is only 4.34 miles long. But is 2065’ above sea level. And largely fenceless. Legend says the trench was cut into the earth by the gods as they hurried down from heaven to save Ulysses from the Sirens. Today, it is a medium-intensity trek with intimations of mortality.
After 131 “zones”, your Fitbit lathers.
It was rather off-putting climbing up the 1300 steps from Praiano before even beginning the famously scenic and scary walk to see centipede corpses on every step. Death by blisters is a long and painful death if you have a hundred feet.
The path from stretches from Agerola (Bomerano which cheats get a taxi to, so avoid the strenuous step climb ) to Nocelle (where you can get a bus to Positano).
The Amalfi coast provides the ultimate step-up class. Building “scala” (steps) is an ancient south Italian tradition. You can tell the locals by their huge calves, massive thighs and impressive diaphragms.
Capri is much easier going. On its precipices and promontories, your thoughts of mortality and emergency helicopter extraction are less constant. Hyperventilation is rare. You don’t swear so much either. You don’t curse the rocky CUSS’s (cumulative uphill stretches).
One of the flattest “passetiello” paths is to the Philosophical Park in the Migliari (Millet) area of Anacapri. It has sixty tables bearing epigrams, apothegms and miscellaneous nuggets of wisdom from western philosophers. None of whom mention cramp. Behind the park there is a fabulous view of the island’s Three Monsters- the Faraglioni sea stacks.
Compared to the mainland, walking Capri there is not such a fine line between relaxation and infarction. Exhilaration and defibrillation. Because there is a funicular railway and a chairlift. The island is one of the most breath-taking places on earth. Visually as well as aerobically.
A 50-minute, £25 hydrofoil or fast ferry from Naples, it is advisable to book in advance online. The excellent “On Foot” offers self-guided walking tours as well as walking holidays along the Amalfi Divine Coast. Ferries connect Capri and Sorrento.
Walking by yourself and exploring Capri at your own pace has many advantages to escorted tours. You can concentrate on your oxygen intake rather than listen to some guide droning on about paganism, Old Hella, Roman rule, Saracens, the peccadilloes of Emperor Tiberius, the five Gallic isles and the plague of 1656 (reputedly brought over in a lover’s lock of hair sent in a locket ).
Capri was the first Magaluf. A place of questionable, if not untraditional morality to which many went to escape “the menacing stagnation” and sexual repression of the rest of Europe.
A Caprinese villa crawl is just as exhausting as an orgy or participating in Priapic rites. Walks take you on the 1905 Villa Lysis, Tiberius’s Villa Jovis (alleged scene of appalling debauchery and much cucumber growing ), the collapsed Paleolithic grotto-turned- Arco Naturule, the Giardini Augusto, the house where Maxim Gorky welcomed Lenin in 1908 as well as the former homes of Graham Greene and Dame Gracie Fields. “Our Gracie” is buried in Capri Protestant cemetery.
Until you have hiked Campania for four hours a day, you don’t know how desperate a human body can get for grissini, “vongole” (clams) and a mouthful of creamed pumpkin carbo-tagliatelle. For a real gourmet treat on Capri eat at La Terrazzo di Lucillo at the five-star Hotel Caesar Augustus with its views over the Bay of Naples to Vesuvius.
And, because the best walks begin outside, have a cocktail in the Jacky Bar of the Tiberio Palace hotel. Surrounded by white Borsalino Panama hats hanging over a white piano, try “The Sea In Your Hands” (Blue Curacao, white rum agricole, lime juice and tonic) or a “Welcome to Italy” cocktail (white vermouth, rappa, limoncello, lemon juice, and sugar syrup )
As well as a round-island boat tour and trip to the Blue Grotto to hear Americans say “Awesome!” over and over again because of the echoes, you must have a costly gelato, An exorbitant Aperol, a dear Capuccino, over-priced Campari or cliched pricey Bellini under the clock tower of the church of Saint Stefano in La Piazzetta Umberto Primo Square – the so-called “theatre of the world”.
Go on a sky bar crawl.
True content is being away from the maddening posing, tanning and bling-shopping hordes and out of the wind, with no alluring voices of flesh-eating, winged half-porpoise, half-woman with insatiable appetites for passing mariners to disturb your holiday.
Or a sudden pain across the chest or at the bottom of your ribcage to spoil the moments of unhampered hedonism for which the island has long been famed.
On Capri, no one wants to hear the sound of sirens.
Or see too many late centipedes.
For further information :
On Foot Holidays offer self-guided walking holidays. Available April to November, excluding August. https://www.onfootholidays.co.uk/routes/amalfi-coast/
Contact: On Foot Holidays – walks@onfootholidays.co.uk – 01722 322652
www.easyjet.com flies daily to Naples.