Our second stop along the Amalfi Coast was Ravello, a hilltop town of about 2,500 permanent residents and another UNESCO World Heritage site. It was both a short journey, just 20 minutes or so by bus up the steep, steep cliffs from Amalfi, and a short two-night stop. To jump to the main point, in Ravello it’s all about the views. They’re something.

Once upon a time Ravello was relatively big and powerful. In the late 11th century Pope Victor III split the diocese away from Amalfi (to weaken Amalfi and its annoying alliance with the Moslem enemy) and made the city’s bishops subject directly to the Vatican. At it’s peak it held a population of about 25,000 which is pretty remarkable when you see just how hilly it is and how difficult it is to even imagine that many people up there. Its heyday was relatively short, though, as the maritime power Pisa destroyed the city in 1137 after which a long period of decline set in.

What remains today, though, is pretty remarkable. Some of the great buildings and even gardens from Ravello’s glorious past remain, giving the town a grandeur that far exceeds what you would expect from a town of that size. The result is that Ravello is elegant and refined, particularly in contrast to Amalfi’s more touristy brashness. To be sure, there are no beaches way up here and I like beaches as much as the next guy, but the views make up for it. And while there are certainly a bunch of tourists, most of them are making brief day-trips up to the town leaving it peaceful and calm in the evenings.

I loved our brief stop here. Mark was a bit bored, but for me it was obvious why someone like Gore Vidal – American political figure, novelist, and essayist – would spend years living here before he died. Two grand old residences – Villa Cimbrone and Villa Rufolo, dating from the 11th and 13th centuries, respectively – are tourist destinations today with beautiful gardens and stunning views over the coast. For me, an afternoon spent reading in one or the other is a pleasant way to spend my life.

Two days was plenty for Mark, while Gore Vidal spent years here. I’m somewhere in the middle and I look forward to coming back for a longer stay, but from here it was back down to Amalfi to catch a quick boat further up the coast to Positano.

It’s crazy that as much as we have traveled, and in particular as much as we have traveled in Italy, neither Mark nor I have ever been to the Amalfi Coast. It is, after all, one of the world’s great holiday destinations, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and – here’s the big one – the filming location for Wonder Woman’s Amazonian birthplace, Themyscira, in the current film Wonder Woman. Well, finally, that huge gap in our world travels is over.

We’re going to spend nine days here on the Amalfi Coast, three in Amalfi, two in Ravello, and four in Positano. After that it’s Capri and Naples, but for now here’s what we found in Amalfi.

While today it’s a tiny village of less than 5,400 residents that’s been turned over to tourism it was once, along with Genoa and Pisa, one of Italy’s great and powerful city-states. At the turn of the first millennium it was a major trading power with a population of perhaps 80,000, one of the few Christian states that traded freely with the growing Islamic state. That didn’t stop them from participating in the Crusades, of course, and during the appalling Fourth Crusade – when European powers attacked their host, Christian Constantinople instead of trying to free Jerusalem from Moslem control – they captured the supposed relics of St. Andrew the Apostle and carried them back to Amalfi. Today those very same relics lie in Amalfi’s Cathedral of St. Andrew.

And what about today? Today there are tourists. Lots and lots of tourists, including some pretty fancy ones. We noticed right away a big boat anchored in the bay and asked around what it was. It seemed too big to be a personal yacht but too small to be a cruise boat. With a little research Mark learned that it was indeed a personal yacht, one owned by music- and movie-producer David Geffen At 454 feet that sucker is the 11th largest yacht in the world. As Hollywood royalty Geffen hosts all the big names on it – Oprah, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Leonardo DiCaprio – but I first heard of the boat just a few months ago when no less than Michelle & Barrack spent part of their post-White House holiday cruising French Polynesia on the boat. We didn’t see any of them, but the boat was anchored there the whole time we were in Amalfi.

And what did we do in Amalfi? I’d read that the town beach was worth avoiding so the first day we took a little boat to an isolated beach maybe 20 minutes up the coast. It was fun, there was a nice restaurant called Da Teresa, but not really worth going back to. I was particularly annoyed when the waiter at lunch pointed out that service is not included on the bill. Service is always included in Italy and Europeans never tip anything more than spare change; this was just an attempt to drag a few extra bucks out of guilty Americans. So the next day we went to the town beach instead and I thought it was really a lot better: a bigger beach, easier to get into and out of the water, and a lot more lunch choices.

Of course eating is a big part of traveling in Italy and we had a couple of good meals. At one place called L’Abside we had what seemed like the best eggplant parmigiana I’ve ever had. It made me realize that if I travel France looking for the perfect steak tartare I should travel Italy looking for the best eggplant parm. Except I may have already found it.

And then there was one last visit with Lisa, Mark’s old college friend studying down in Salerno and finishing up her five-week Italian sojourn. She took the boat up from Salerno on our last night and we shared wine until it was time for her to go back and us to find dinner.

All in all Amalfi was a fun little town. Probably a little too touristy for my tastes, just too crowded and all. But it certainly is beautiful and it was a good start to this exploration of the Amalfi Coast. Next stop, Ravello.

We love Italy; it’s our favorite country, so far at least (we’ve never been to Romania or Suriname yet, so we can’t be definitive about that). And for all that Rome and Tuscany and Genoa are great, we love southern Italy best of all. So after Mark’s two weeks in Lucca (and my four days there) it was off to the train station for the trip to Salerno. While the journey from Lucca to Florence was slow and frustrating – we had 18 minutes between the time our train was supposed to get in from Lucca and the train down to Salerno was supposed to leave, and we were about 17 minutes late – the high-speed train through Rome and Naples and then on to Salerno was comfy and relaxing.

Salerno itself isn’t such a great city. A city of 135,000 people, it lies about 35 miles southeast of Naples, at the edge of the peninsula that includes the Amalfi Coast. To be honest, there’s not a lot great you can say about Salerno. It’s got a cathedral that’s attractive and worth seeing. The original building dates back to the 11th century, though it’s been remodeled substantially since then, and it allegedly holds the remains of St. Matthew the Apostle (color me skeptical).

The old historic center of town has a great Neopolitan feel to it, for us anyway, with the narrow, winding streets that the sun almost never gets to. And nestled in that old town is Salerno’s medical school, a late medieval institution and the oldest medical school in the West. As long ago as perhaps the 9th century (the ancient history is sketchy) city leaders of Salerno began to use ancient Greek texts, then accumulated at the monastery of Monte Cassino south of Rome. Because of Salerno’s location on the coast, their contact with Arabs – then far advanced relative to Europeans in terms of science and medicine – gave them the opportunity to enhance that Greek knowledge with more modern Arabic insights. And thus was born the medical advancements of the West. Right there in Salerno.

So in Salerno itself, besides the cathedral and old city, there’s not a lot to draw you. Although it is on the coast and we love the Mediterranean, there is not much good to say about the beach. The big deal, though – and it was a big deal – are the old Greek ruins of Paestum. And we almost missed them.

As we were planning this trip through the south we learned that Lisa, one of Mark’s old college friends who today teaches Italian in the Chicago Public Schools, was going to be studying in Salerno the same time we planned on being there. At our first dinner together she asked what we were going to do in Salerno. We gave her our too-common, g response “Oh, you know, walk around, see what’s here. We don’t have anything in mind.”

Well, Lisa didn’t want to waste her time in Salerno so she started throwing out ideas and when she mentioned Paestum our ears perked up. Paestum was an early Greek colony established in the first millennium BC when the Greeks were spreading out; while today we think of this as Italy, back then it was known as “Greater Greece.” Paestum was a big stop on the 18th century European “Grand Tour” and only a few miles from Salerno so we were excited about going down there.

Early the next morning, then, we hopped on a train for the 40-minute ride down to Paestum. The big draws in Paestum are three large temples still standing after over 2,500 years. There are few places in the world where you can see even one ancient Greek temple still standing, and here there are three. Throughout the ruins are old city streets and the foundations of many, many buildings. Even the remains of a smallish amphitheater, part of which was demolished so a 19th century Italian could build a road through it.

The temples – believed to have been dedicated to Hera, Neptune, and Athena – were really pretty amazing. Big old columns that have been standing there for century after century. One of the great things about the site is that you didn’t have to admire them from a distance: here you could walk right into and through two of them. There’s nothing quite like that “up close and personal” approach.

Near the site was a pretty good museum, too, that included the Tomb of the Diver. Discovered in 1968, the tomb dates to about 470 BC is made up of five limestone slabs, each of them painted in fresco. The four sides are scenes from a surprisingly homoerotic symposium, while the cover slab is that of a man diving into waves. Of thousands of Greek tombs recovered from this era, this is the only one with frescoes of human subjects. And as it was protected from the elements for nearly 2,500 years – it was, after all, buried – the slabs and the art are in remarkable condition.

Our three days in Salerno went well, then. We had fun with Lisa, including taking her out for her birthday, and started to relax into the vibe of southern Italy. From here we head just a little north up to Amalfi where we’ll spend a couple weeks lazing on the Amalfi Coast and then out to Capri. I’ve been waiting a long time for this!