The Mediterranean Sea
It’s not as calm as you might think.
For the last month I have almost never been more than a mile away from the Mediterranean and most of time a lot closer. I could see the wave above from the apartment we are renting in Camogli in Liguria. The sea has been wilder here.
Unlike Donalucatta in Sicily where two fishermen I came across could be by a lake.
The sea was also placid in Tropea in Calabria. On a hot day even in late April you would be hard pressed to walk on this beach without stepping on a sunning body.
On Easter Sunday I had lunch at this hillside villa, surrounded by a few acres of lush gardens. It sits above Amatea, a town in Calabria beside the Mediterranean.
You can see the trains from the house. Sitting beside a woman who grew up there, she told me she and her sister would count the cars on the trains passing by the Mediterranean. “We would match the car numbers to the alphabet and that would be the intiial of the name our first boyfriend.”
And more wild waves in Zoaglia, a town in Liguria few people have ever heard of.
Ripley in Italy
Tom Ripley carrying Dickie Greenleaf’s bag. Finished watching the Netflix series on Saturday night. It was brilliant. Critics said they wouldn’t watch it because it was in black and white and not as beautiful as the 1999 film. Wrong, I think. The black and white make 1950s Italy look moody and threatening. The actors aren’t as well known, I couldn’t name one of them. The eight and half hours of the series means lots of nuance you don’t get in a movie. Terrific that a lot of Italian is used. Police inspector, Pietro Ravini, is almsot as great a character as Tom Ripley. I recently re-read all five of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels; I pray for a new series; it will be easy to follow this.
Maps
There are 22 countries that ring the Mediterranean, from Albania to Algeria and Tunis to Turkey, with a coastline of 46,000 kilometres or 28,500 miles.
The Mediterranean was a Roman sea after they cleared away the likes of Hannibal and the Cathaginains in North Africa. The young Julius Caesar was once captured by pirates who in the Medierranean. They let him go and a ransom was paid. Foolish. He went back and had them crucified.
There’s a map for everything on the Internet. This one gives you an idea of the size of the Mediterranean Sea, stretching from San Jose to Washington and North Dakota to Texas, 965,300 square miles about a third the area of the lower 48 US States.
Breakfast. Not all food is fancy. The Brioche a la marmalatta. It’s brioche here, according to people who sell them, but in other parts of Italy, it’s a Cornetto.
Lunch. Grilled seafood straight from a boat in the harbour.
All the ships at sea, or at least one that just left the port of Genoa on Friday night.
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