On Friday our tour guide, Sam, had to go to work, so Melissa and I, and Jim and Lee were left to fend for ourselves.  Our sightseeing plan for the day was to check out the Island of Ischia, located an hour ferry ride away from Pozzouli.  The night before Sam had shown us the ferry dock, and buying tickets to the island was no problem.  Jim had Google translate on his phone which helped out a lot.

The ferry was huge! It was easily the biggest boat I’ve ever been on.  There were two decks for cars, two outside decks for people, and an inside area with a restaurant/concession stand.  We boarded the boat as soon as all the people from the island got off, and as cars were still exiting.  We spent some time looking around, and when we made it to the top deck, we noticed the cars were still driving off in a steady stream.  It was a big boat, but I don’t know how they fit that many cars inside, and as we were watching cars leave we could also see the lineup of cars waiting to get on stretching as far as we could see the road.

Once on the island, our first task was to buy a ferry ticket back to Pozzouli.  Sam had advised us that sometimes they sell out, and even though there are worse things than getting stranded on a Mediterranean island, we wanted to sleep in the hotel we paid for.  We walked from one end of the docks to the other, and back to the boat along a side street.  Even with four sets of eyes looking, we couldn’t find the ticket office.  I tried to ask a bystander in Italian if he knew where it was, and he just said, “No”, (but I don’t know if he understood what I said.)  Then Jim and I approached a man in a ferry uniform.  I started to mumble the Italian, but then Jim showed him his phone with our question to which he chuckled and pointed us to a building that looked like a restaurant, and had a sign that said ‘such and such bar’.  Sure enough, inside that building, even though there was no sign on the outside, was the ticket office.  We bought tickets for the last ferry back, at 4:50 p.m.

It was near lunch time, so our next objective was to find a good looking restaurant.  Along the way as we searched, taxi drivers kept pestering us to give us rides, and it seemed like we were breaking their hearts when we said, “No.”  After walking by a few restaurants we found one on the waterfront, with outdoor seating,  prominently displaying their menu items on a table out front.  Fresh caught fish, mushrooms, pasta, and a rabbit carcass.  Jim is an adventurous enough eater that he convinced us all to order the rabbit stew.  Before the stew, a pasta was served, and we had ordered an appetizer of bruschetta.  The rabbit’s taste, even though it’s cliché to say, is that it tastes like chicken.

The main sight on the island is the Aragon Castle, located about a mile from the port, we decided to walk the distance after lunch.  The roads and buildings on the island seemed a little better maintained than in Pozzouli, and surprisingly there were cars everywhere, which seems strange to me because of how far the island is from the mainland. Along the way we found a large garden to walk through, with narrow pathways, dense tropical plants, and cats.  Melissa had to stop and pet them, even though we weren’t sure what kind of Italian diseases they might have.  The garden was a place one could easily get lost in.  We thought it would be a shortcut, but after walking around for about 15 minutes, exited on a path close to where we entered.  It was hot, humid, and sunny our whole walk, so when we got close to the castle and saw a beach we took a detour to wade in the clear warm water.

The castle is located at the top of a small steep island, jutting over 200 ft straight up from the Mediterranean.  There is a narrow medieval bridge connecting it to Ischia.  It has been used as a fortress since 474 B.C., but most of the current buildings were built when it was controlled by the kings of Aragon (Spain) in the years after 1441 A.D.  Thankfully there is an elevator to the top. Once there the grounds were much larger than I thought they’d be. The pamphlet said that at its peak population, at the end of the 16th century, the island was home to 1892 families.  At the top we saw medieval buildings, a convent, gardens, and the amazing views of the clear blue sea.  The strangest sight to me was a place called the Nun’s cemetery.  It was two windowless rooms, much cooler than outside, with what looked like carved stone chairs along the walls.  According to the pamphlet, when the nuns died their bodies were placed on the chairs with a vase underneath to collect fluids.  Then when all that was left were dried out bones, they were placed in an ossuary.

We stayed at the castle until about 3:30 p.m. and then realized we didn’t have enough time to explore anything else on the island.  We found a taxi to our ferry’s port, and sat at a cafe until the ferry arrived.

Once back in Pozzulli, Sam met us at the docks and we walked back up to the hotel to rest before dinner.  True Italian meals are marathons not sprints, it’s good to be rested before.  Around 7:45 p.m. we sat down for dinner at a seafood restaurant that Sam picked out.  The restaurant served in a traditional Italian way prix fixe, which is to charge a flat fee and have no menu.  All we had to do was sit down and drink as much wine as we like as the waiters brought us dish after dish.  The first course, antipasti, consisted of squid, octopus, shrimp, bruschetta, pickled sardines, fried sardines, oysters, and two kinds of fish fillets.  There was no mistaking the freshness of the food, from our table we could just see the sea, where I’m sure everything we ate was very recently swimming.  Even though the antipasti would have made a large meal by itself after an hour we moved on to the next course.

The course after antipasti is called primi.  We were served a family style plate of seafood pasta, large enough for everyone to fill up for seconds.  It had a rich and spicy tomato flavor, with lots of shells and shellfish to crack open.  After this course we had to throw in the towel on making it through the marathon.  We were offered another course, called the secondi, but told the waiter we were too full and skipped ahead to the dessert course.

For dessert we were served a cake soaked in rum called in Italian ‘baba’.  But dessert wasn’t the end… the final course is the digestive, which is shots of limoncello and grappa (two local hard alcohols).  Serving of the shots was different than in the U.S.  All the waiter did was bring the bottles and glasses out for us, and walk away, letting us pour ourselves as many as we liked.  The bill at end was 30 euros per person, which is extremely expensive for southern Italy, but seemed like a good deal compared to Swiss prices.

Around 10 p.m. we left the restaurant, and strangely saw a different group arrive and sit at our empty table to begin their meal.  To work off some of our calories we walked along the boardwalk before returning to the hotel, and it too was crowded with people, families, and small children still out enjoying the summer night.

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