Leg Day; Prada-Spotting in the Clouds

2:30am: You aren’t asleep because jet lag or midnight gelato or both roused you from a dream about not being able to find your car at your own wedding. The hillsides are alive with howling, yowling, baying hounds in tempo prestissimo. They freak each other out in simultaneous call and response, and this continues unbroken until dawn, when you look up the phrase “the dogs bark all night” (i cani abbaiano tutta la notte) so you can say it to Salvatore, the charming little old Italian man who manages the lemon grove and the breakfast. When you step out the door at 7am — red eyed, pallid, and still drum-taut with a shitty pasta that hasn’t begun to digest — he is just below your balcony, puttering with some deck boards from the empty above-ground pool that is in post-season renovations. He sympathizes, and suggests closing the window. It is your honeymoon, so you do not tear the sky from the air and cram it in his eyes with your shaky white fingers, which have become skeleton bones. It is not his specific fault Italians have no sense of dog management; the property dog, Spot, has been nothing but silent and indifferent.

Instead, you gather your best self from somewhere deep in your medulla and tell yourself you’re going to have a lovely breakfast visiting with him and his bright, tiny wife Nilde in the new little breakfast cottage they are so proud of. You like chatting with old people; you miss your own grandparents. You enjoy a tender, slightly sour warm croissant with thick, almost vindictive lashes of their homemade lemon marmalade. Nilde sets out a dish of fresh lemon cookies, and you swab them with marmalade. The hard-boiled egg is a bit green at the yolk and salt bounces off it. Don’t be a prick, they keep filling your cappuccino and offering personal dining recommendations in the far-off hills of Campagna.

Soon you and your refreshed bride, who slept, hike the thousand steep stone steps to Ravello, another ancient hamlet in the clouds. It is one mile; it takes one hour.

A 14th century villa (Rufolo) is the epicenter of affluent tourism there; you see your first organic glimpses of Prada on the women. The immaculately groomed men wear the seasonally appropriate Ralph Lauren collection. The people-watching on the square is world-class: sweaty pie-faced youngersomethings with backpacks queue democratically for tables with Warren Buffet’s pinochle buddies. Up here the taxis are black Mercedes vans we don’t have in the Stati Uniti. We choose to sweat it back down, plunging down the steps on protesting shins.

Murdered by heat and sun, you shower and collapse back at the lemon ranch. A so-so outdoor dinner on the Minori port square, managed by one of those stereotypical Italian cocks, is fine, and later you go to bed, and this time, in shifts, you eke out nearly eight hours. The sky has cracked open with a deluge that washes all the dogs away down a ravine to hell, and you smile as consciousness collapses in around you.