The view of the Adriatic Sea from Caesar Augustus, one of the many stops on the writer's Italian tour
But every intense afternoon was accompanied by quiet evenings, like spending a night at Caesar Augustus overlooking the turquoise blue waters of the sea. Adriatic Sea. This is where we start to find our rhythm of travel. While she gets ready in the morning, I jog to the hotel gym at the edge of the cliff. Later we spend the afternoon at the iconic hotel's idyllic swimming pool (me soaking up the sun while reading The Godfather, my mother under the shade of an umbrella on her trusty iPad.)
The main point of our trip is a handful of days in the chaos of Naples, where a cavalcade of cousins kindly welcomed us. Although many of them barely speak English, we all communicate very well thanks to a mixture of Google Translate and the fact that hand gestures are as much the language of Italians as the words themselves. “It is a lot It’s hot,” moaned a cousin while fanning himself, alluding to the European heatwave which was making national headlines at the time. Our first night is dinner at a long table in their humble cobbled courtyard flanked on all sides by apartments. It’s a Felliniesque scene as my mother and I find ourselves caught in the Italian crossfire of passionate conversations of which we can only catch one word out of maybe fifty. It was confusing. It was sweaty. I never wanted it to end.
While my mother meets my cousin Barbara at the family apartment overlooking the Maradona Stadium, I get in the car to visit a local open-air market with my cousin Fabrizio. We select fresh shellfish for a spaghetti alle vongole that he later concocts, as good as in any quality trattoria.
On our last day in Naples, I decide to head out alone on a sweltering Sunday afternoon. “Relax, stay inside, everything is closed!” » my mother and family begged me, as if I had decided on a whim to climb Everest in socks. But how often do we find ourselves with free time in Naples? I eventually escape and end up finding a hole-in-the-wall bar with delicious glasses of iced wine on tap – the perfect precursor for when they come to pick me up later for dinner. As we pile into a car driving through these wild streets, I listen to Pino Danile's “Napule” and we all sing along to its anthemic lyrics, Mount Vesuvius looms in the distance.
After saying a tearful goodbye to our family, we board a Trenitalia car, bulky luggage and all, to the Eternal City for one last hurray: a stay in Rome. Hotel Hassler. It's a special place considering Audrey Hepburn lived at Hassler's house when she filmed Roman holidays. We watched the 1953 classic together during pandemic-induced isolation, when a trip like this was a distant dream. As the hotel doorman, complete with top hat and tailcoat, opens the door to its opulent lobby and a pianist tinkles the keys in the distance, this dream solidifies and becomes reality.
In the evening, after tossing a coin into the nearby Trevi Fountain (while I play Frank Sinatra's “Three Coins in a Fountain” on my iPhone), we relax on the Hassler's terrace with a spectacular view of the city. urban landscape. I sip a dirty, lip-smacking martini and I'm sweating bullets; Today is one of the hottest times in the Eternal City's long history, but we're still taking selfies on the terrace with the city's famous landmarks in the distance – just so everyone knows that we arrived in Rome. without issueOf course.
But we have also changed in these last two weeks. Like the glasses we toasted together, we grew closer through a shared array of unique memories – and our ability to roll with the punches, whether it was sweltering heat or an abundance of stairs. The latter is a welcome revelation: the signature of the Hassler Hotel is its “ideal” location atop the mighty Spanish Steps. All 135.
