Amalfi is my idea of the quintessential Mediterranean coastal village, the place you picture when you close your eyes and think of an Italian summer by the sea.
It has a lovely breakwater-protected harbour, and a beach composed of tiny pebbles that make gentle crackling noises as they roll with the emerald-coloured waves.
There’s a promenade, of course, that everybody walks on, both early in the morning and in the evening after dark; and a road, but not a very busy one. The bus terminal is just a set of parking places off the main piazza, and you’d hardly know they were even there.
The buildings of the town rise up almost straight from the back of the beach, and appear to be set directly into the sides of cliffs. And the town’s main thoroughfare is the paved version of the track people and donkeys used for well-over two thousand years.
It follows (and these days covers) a stream that runs right along the bottom of two very steep facing slopes. Long ago the stream and slopes became the town’s commercial centre, which includes a central piazza with a wonderfully ornate (and certainly intriguing) fountain that people still drink from. For the record, they only use the spigots coming from the cherubs’ fish, not the two emanating from the rather amply endowed beauty that takes centre stage!
Opposite the fountain there’s an amazing set of stairs that lead to one of the most beautiful small cathedrals I think I’ve ever seen. This is where at least a few remains of St. Andrew are said to lie in an enormous crypt below the pews.
What makes the cathedral special, I guess, is its position, looking down on the main piazza from on high, and the fact that it is so beautifully decorated and well-maintained. It also happens to have a set of massive bronze doors that came all the way from Jerusalem, just a few decades after the turn of the first millennium.
As for shops, Amalfi still retains a commercial core that sells the sort of things they always have – cured and fresh meats, vegetables, big white balls of buffalo mozzarella, and baked goods in the form of beautiful cakes and biscotti, as well as a whole range of fresh breads. You won’t find any supermarket with a big carpark. There just isn’t enough room.
Of course, Amalfi also has a number of places selling things to tourists, but almost always in that style the Italians do so well. For instance, the Amalfi coast is famous for its limoncello, produced from lemons grown higher up the slopes, and you can buy this wonderful liquid, so evocative of hot summer evenings, in all manner of decanters and styles.
ooOOoo
While Amalfi is over-run by tourists in the summer, there is at least one event that brings out the locals from all the surrounding districts, even though it occurs just at the time winter begins. And the whole thing has to do with their patron saint.
In 1544, the coastal settlements were being harassed by the dreaded Barbarossa (Italian for “Red Beard”), a pirate and later admiral of the Ottoman-Turks, who dominated the Mediterranean for many years.
Bigger places like Salerno and Naples had been pillaged, so when the brigand’s ships appeared out to sea the Amalfitani did what any God-fearing people with the remains of a famous Apostle would – they formed a procession and took their sacred statue of St. Andrew out to the shore.
Tradition has it that shortly thereafter the sea became very choppy; so rough, in fact that the attackers set sail to ensure their boats didn’t end up on the rocky outcrops on either side of the tiny bay. Amalfi was saved.
So every year on the last day of November, the good people of the town re-enact the event. But the celebration is clearly for locals, rather than for tourists, judging by the fact that for the week prior there were no signs advertising what was going to happen, and especially at what time.
The first inkling I had was seeing people start to gather on the roundabout just outside the village gate. So I made my way into the town piazza, although there was hardly anyone milling about.
I was sure something was going to happen sooner or later, however, because of the presence of six Carabinieri (the Italian national police), resplendent in their pompously-feathered caps.
I decided to climb the mostly empty stairs, and it was when I got to the top that everything became clear. There was a mass going on inside the cathedral, and the place was absolutely packed.
By noon the cathedral bells were in full cry, someone was letting off what sounded like a small cannon out on the breakwater pier, and townspeople began to appear from every nook, cranny and tiny walkway.
In no time the piazza was filled to over-flowing, and the Carabinieri, still chatting away as if they were on holiday, were joined by other, local policemen wearing what looked like English bobbies’ hats.
A band made its way up the steps in a rag-tag and quite leisurely way, and about ten minutes later, from off to one side on the portico, they began to play.
This, it turned out, was the signal. The side doors of the church opened up, people streamed down the stairs, and while many joined the crowd at the piazza below, others took up positions right along each side, next to the great marble bannisters.
Finally the famous bronze doors slowly opened, and out came the procession. At the head was a giant umbrella coloured in burgundy and yellow stripes which was held, very tentatively it seemed, by a large man dressed in a long red tunic with gold piping.
All around him were other, quite fit young men, dressed the same way. I couldn’t work out what they were all doing there, really, although a few were carrying gold-coloured cords attached to the various umbrella ends.
Next came a group of more middle-aged men in cream-coloured robes, looking like they might be members of the local elite. On their garments was emblazoned a stylised Maltese-like symbol known as the Amalfi Cross.
They tried their best to hold a dignified pose as they walked before the crowd. But it was offset, I have to report, by the immense berets that drooped like half-risen black pizza dough all over their heads.
The church entourage was next, including a choirmaster who seemed to be the only one really organising things. In the middle, surrounded by the churchly group, was the Archbishop of Amalfi, moving his head very slowly from side to side to acknowledge the on-looking parishioners, but never showing so much as the faintest smile.
Finally the statue of St. Andrew emerged, weighing in at something over 250kg, with the whole thing carried aloft on poles by at least twenty strongly built, red-cloaked men.
As you can imagine, it took some doing to get the statue safely down the stairs. The men on the back poles had to take more than their share of the weight, while those at the front at times looked like they were standing on tippy-toe.
But eventually they got there, and then the whole show moved off up the street, accompanied from behind by a throng of locals. As I mentioned previously, there’s only one real street in Amalfi, which goes right up an ever-narrowing stream bed, so eventually the entire throng had to turn around and then proceed back down to the piazza again.
I was expecting chaos, but everyone casually took it in their stride. After all, at times it was hard to figure out just who was (and who wasn’t) in the procession, and no one, least of all the various policemen, seemed to really care all that much.
Eventually St. Andrew made his way down to the seashore, as I most certainly expected he would. The archbishop said a prayer and doused the statue with incense smoke, swinging a gold and jewel-encrusted censer on a chain.
Then after an appropriate amount of time just gazing out to sea (looking for Red Beard’s sails on the horizon, no doubt), everyone went back to the bottom of the cathedral steps.
The choirmaster took control at this point, making sure there was a clear path all the way up to the top. And it was just as well.
Because all those “surplus” young men dressed in red tunics appeared as if from nowhere, and crowding around the already substantial number of carriers holding the statue up, proceeded to push… and pull… and run the hefty St. Andrew up the many stairs, and right through the big bronze doors.
They did it in such a rush it looked like something out a religious rugby playbook – a sacred and very saintly scrum!
The crowd cheered, and when the carriers somehow managed to turn the statue around inside the cathedral and bring it back out onto the portico to take a bow, the cheers were replaced with long and boisterous applause. St. Andrew was safely back in his lodgings for yet another year.
ooOOoo
At the gates leading to the piazza and cathedral steps, there is a plaque hanging on the wall that first-time visitors to Amalfi often miss. It’s a quote, which I have attempted to translate, from the Italian writer Renato Fucini, who visited the town almost 150 years ago:
“On Judgement Day,
when the people of Amalfi enter Heaven,
for them it will be a day like any other.”
~originally composed in December, 2011~