The Running of the Boar: Travel Tales and Other Musings about One Newlywed Couple’s Move to Italy

A Swinging Good Birthday

As November rolled on, I was soon faced with one of my most daunting challenges thus far on this Italy adventure: Celia’s thirtieth birthday. Frankly, I was a little worried.

Back home, I would have had all kinds of help planning a party, finding the right gift, or coming up with the exact right thing to do for a woman on the big three-oh, an event which is apparently quite a big deal in their estrogen-filled world. Her sister Jocelyn or good friend Holly would surely have taken me aside and said, "Oh yes, she’ll love this" or "Oh my God no, unless you want an instant divorce don’t do that." And I, of course, thanks to their help and insight into the female condition would have ended up looking like the romantic, clever hero every man believes himself to be. But now that we lived in Italy, there was no Jocelyn. There was no Holly. I was on my own. And this was not good. Because left to his own foolish devices on a woman’s birthday, a man is capable of unspeakable boneheadedness, and is liable to buy completely inappropriate birthday gifts that a woman couldn’t imagine in her worst nightmares: gambling trips to Vegas, fishing gear, new power tools, Celtics courtside season tickets, lingerie (the slutty Frederick’s of Hollywood kind, not the good-girl Victoria’s Secret kind), monogrammed bowling balls, the Clint Eastwood DVD box set, what have you.

But I didn’t want to make the same mistakes as my male brethren. After all, this was her thirtieth, our first as a married couple, and our first, obviously, as a married couple living in Italy. And on top of that, for the past few years she had really been looking forward to what she would have done on her thirtieth had we stayed in the States: she would have gone to the Canyon Ranch Spa in the Berkshires with her friend Linda for three days of mud baths, yoga, massages, spin classes, whirlpools, high-impact aerobics, nutritional coaching, and a general combo of torture and pampering. Despite the fact that there was no football-watching or pizza-eating on the daily schedule, two glaring omissions that would clearly make it impossible for a man to enjoy for even four seconds, Canyon Ranch was apparently the utopian thirtieth birthday package for a woman. But the reality of the situation was that we were 3,000 miles away from Linda and the Berkshires, so the Canyon Ranch dream was over and it was back to square one. The success and happiness of Celia’s thirtieth birthday now rested squarely on my shoulders, and only my shoulders. Which makes it so easy to understand why, in one large way at least, I totally and completely screwed it up.

I did manage to choose a great place to take her, which, in my opinion anyway, makes Canyon Ranch look like a Gold’s Gym in Jersey City. Every birthday since I’ve known Celia, I’ve taken her to some surprise, secret location for a weekend getaway, usually including one amazing splurge of a dinner and quaint little B&B or hotel, neither of which I could usually afford. Her twenty-seventh was to a romantic little B&B in Kennebunkport, Maine. Her twenty-eighth was to a romantic little B&B on Martha’s Vineyard. Her twenty-ninth was to a romantic little B&B in Lenox, Mass in the Berkshires (coincidentally, not that far from Canyon Ranch. And her thirtieth? Well, at least the Where part of her birthday wasn’t a problem. After all, I had the entire country of Italy at my disposal, not to mention the rest of Europe, all of which was more or less easily accessible from Florence. There were hundreds of wonderful, unique, romantic, unforgettable spots for a young husband to take his young wife to impress the hell out of her. So after mulling over a few of these possibilities–Sicily, Cinque Terre, Sardinia, Greece, Mallorca, a Fiorentina soccer game (hey, I didn’t say my dumb male side never reared its ugly head)–and asking some of our Italian friends, I finally settled on the absolute perfect place: Capri. The island of Capri would be perfect this time of year, still fairly warm (being located a few hours south of Florence) but no longer swarming with the tourists that flocked there in the summer months. From the pictures I saw and the accounts of some of the people I spoke to, it was one of those places on earth that make you stop and think "I can’t believe there’s a place like this on earth." I couldn’t wait. I had found the Place.

However, I had still yet to find the Gift. And here, I was totally at a loss. But this year was a completely different type of birthday situation. First, birthday shopping for Celia is harder than usual because Celia is a harder than usual person to shop for. Scratch that: she’s fucking impossible to shop for. She’s not a clothes hound, or a jewelry nut, or a makeup lunatic. She has fairly simple tastes, good taste, not plain or dull or tacky, but she’s just not one of those women who will be disappointed if the diamond isn’t over two carats or the scarf doesn’t cost $1,000. And if she does want something, she’ll go out and buy it for herself. Like the coffeepot. That was what I was going to get her for her thirtieth.

Now, before all you Oprah-watching women get all Dr. Phil on me and call me an unromantic skinflint, this is the one thing she had wanted since the day we moved into our apartment and saw the little coffee pot that the place came with: one of those old-fashioned, seasoned, Italian steel kettles, the kind you stand right on the burner until it starts percolating. Being a coffee nut, she fell in love with the little Italian kettle from the first time she used it. So I was set. From September on, I knew that come November, the little Italian kettle was going to be the Gift. However, not surprisingly, bought it for herself in the Rinascente department store. I was back to square one. I had no idea what to get her. And since we were in Italy, my knowledge of the stores for women was severely limited. Plus, I was already starting off within a relatively small shopping box. Knowing we both had birthdays coming up–mine is in December–and didn’t have tons of money to throw around, we agreed that we’d go very light on birthday and Christmas presents this year because this – moving to Italy – was our present to each other, and a damned good one, if you ask me. So nothing much else would be necessary, and we set a $50 limit. We even shook on it. Now, all you guys out there, let this little part of the story serve as a giant, flaming red flag of a cautionary tale: even if your wife says you will "go light" on gifts and you will therefore set a limit of "$50" please, PLEASE, for the love of all that’s holy, ignore her. However, I blatantly failed to heed this advice and made a colossal screw-up in the gift department. I fell under the spell and with my defenses down, thinking it was safe to proceed with the $50 gift plan, made a blunder of epic proportions. In the meantime, I’ll tell you about some things I didn’t botch like, again, the great choice of Capri as the birthday destination.

We left the day before her birthday, and took a train from Florence to Naples. From the very first glance, I could tell one thing and one thing only about Naples: it was a hellhole. A hellhole with crazed, wild hornets in it. The dangerous, frenetic energy one feels when setting foot in Naples is staggering. Granted, what we saw was the stretch of city on Corso Umberto that ran from the train station to the ferry that would take us to Capri, and there were probably nice parts of Naples somewhere, but still, we’ve been told by both Italians and friends who’ve been there that ugly stretch of street is pretty much the way the rest of the city is, too. There was trash strewn everywhere. All the buildings had a certain run-down, bombed-out look that gave everything an abandoned urban jungle appearance. The people on the sidewalks and hanging out of windows either displayed a wild-eyed madness or a sleepy drug-addled, zombie-like aura. And then there was the traffic. Naples takes the scooter-fueled chaos of the Florentine streets and multiplies it by a million. Traffic laws aren’t just broken in Naples. They simply do not exist. Scooters flew toward, around, past, under, over our cab in all directions. I think one even went through the backseat at one point and the driver tried to grab Celia’s necklace but I may have imagined that. Cars driving the wrong way on our side of the street barreled straight toward us before veering back into their own lanes, over concrete dividers no less, switching lanes and flying through red lights without the slightest hesitation or glance into a rearview or side mirror. Pedestrians who dared step into the street played a homicidal game of "Frogger," dodging cars and scooters that were very obviously trying not to avoid them, but run them down where they stood. The taxi finally came to a screeching halt, and the driver let us out, alive no less, at the docks where the Traghetti (Ferries) depart.

There were about ten windows selling tickets to different destinations–Sardinia, Sorrento, Ischia, Procida, Palermo–all with no lines whatsoever in front of them. But in true Italian fashion, the one window we needed, the Capri window, had a wild pack of seedy-looking men gathered in front of it. It wasn’t so much a line, though. Remember, Italians don’t do lines. It was more like a disorganized rugby scrum, with lots of yelling and gesticulating and bawdy, macho, competitive behavior reminiscent of a pack of wild, starving dogs all fighting over scraps of gristle in an alley behind a restaurant. Even close up I had no idea what the hell was going on. There was a person working the ticket window, but he didn’t appear to be in much of a hurry to actually sell tickets, and no one was handing him money and walking away with tickets, which is what you would expect in any normal ticket-purchasing situation. Instead, the men just remained clogged up into a bottleneck in front of the window and playfully jostled each other, occasionally getting each other in headlocks or punching each other’s shoulders. Unlike me, they seemed to be having a great time. Most of them wore navy-blue pea coats and tight, black burglar hats and were red-eyed and unshaven, like a ragtag crew of merchant marines after a long night in the bars and brothels. But while they projected an element of oafish playfulness, they also had that dangerous look of a mob that could suddenly spiral out of control and turn to mindless violence, demonstrated by the occasional shove, clumsy, gesticulating outburst against a nearby buddy, or a frantic pounding on the thick Plexiglas ticket window, which was obviously thick and Plexiglas for just this reason. Unfortunately, this seemed to be the only Capri window open, the next ferry was in fifteen minutes, and the crowd in "line" ahead of me not only wasn’t moving but also didn’t seem to be interested in the usual ticket-buying process that would make a line move.

I was very anxious and frustrated. I didn’t want to spend one more minute in this filth-encrusted sewer of a city. As Celia waited far enough away that the animals wouldn’t pick up the scent of a woman in the air, descend upon her, ravage her, and steal our guidebooks, I stood at the end of the line watching the chaos grow around me. I was utterly dumbfounded about what to do but unsure what other course we had. In slow but perfectly understandable Italian, I asked a sleepy-eyed guy who suddenly appeared in line behind me if this was the only ticket window for Capri. He just stared at me with lifeless, dumb-guy eyes, and, without responding, shoved past me and joined his fellow imbeciles in the yelling and shouting. I was getting so goddamned sick of Italians, sick of their Italian yelling and their nonsensical, maddening Italian customs and their stupid language that I couldn’t speak well enough to find out what the hell was going on. And this was a shame, because as far as I could tell we were still in Italy and would be for some time to come. I turned toward Celia and gave her my famous "I’m so fucking fed-up right now I could kill someone" look, one she had gotten to know well recently. At first she shrugged helplessly but then she pointed over my right shoulder to an open ticket window that had no one in front of it. I looked at it, then back at her, and shook my head angrily as if to say "I know for sure they don’t sell Capri tickets at that window," but she pointed at it again as if to say "It’s worth checking out," and I gritted my teeth and glared at her as if to say "Okay, I lied, I’m not sure, but to prove you wrong I’ll go check it out, but I’m going to lose my place in line and if the other window sells tickets to Capri why aren’t these savages banging that window instead of this one and since you’re making me leave this line it’ll be your fault when the tickets sell out and we miss the ferry and I’ll be so pissed, and remember that thing we fought about two weeks ago, well, even though I can’t remember what that was I’m pissed about that too." (Yes, I am able to communicate all that with one single look; call it a gift.) Finally, I gave her a "Okay, screw it, it’ll be your fault anyway" look and walked over to the other window. I asked the guy, again in Italian, if I could buy tickets to Capri at this window and if so could I please have two. At first I didn’t think he had heard me over the screaming, rowdy noise of the knuckleheads not six feet away but without even looking up he sighed, punched a few buttons, and two tickets shot out of a printer. He slid them under the plexiglass and the transaction was complete. That’s all anyone had to do, just walk six feet over to the other Capri window and ask politely for a ticket? Then what were all those crazy goombahs still doing yelling and screaming at the first window? Jesus Christ, this country made no sense.

But like Lou from Prada, our serial killer, said two months ago, if you go somewhere new and try to replicate the place you come from, you’ll drive yourself nuts and end up hating it. So I took a few deep breaths and tried to just let it go, because it certainly wasn’t the time to try and figure out the mysteries of Italian culture. We headed off as inconspicuously as possible, suitcase in tow, leaving the frenzied shouts and five o’clock shadows of the wild merchant marines behind us. For all I know, they’re still gathered there, a little older, a little more haggard, but still yelling and shouting at a ticket window that’s long been closed and boarded up.

We soon learned we had actually purchased tickets for an aliscafo, or a high-speed hydrofoil, which was more comfortable and, as its name implies, faster than a regular ferry because it’s a hydro and, um, a foil. We boarded with two tour groups, one Japanese (those guys are everywhere) and one speaking what the recesses of my brain recognized as Spanish. Because it was overcast and windy, we settled in below decks and enjoyed a bumpy but speedy ride across the Bay of Naples toward a mountainous chunk of limestone that lay forty-five minutes away on the horizon, the la Isla di Capri.

Capri was–is–a living, breathing postcard.

As the hydrofoil crept into the Marina Grande, the island’s main port, it immediately became clear to me that I’d never been anywhere quite like this, and after three days probably never would again. I was enchanted by the island the second I laid eyes upon it. The Alps were stunning in their own right, but they were a different kind of stunning entirely. As you enter Capri harbor, you see cliffs of sheer limestone dropping straight down into an ocean whose blue-green hues seem almost unreal, a trick of the sun, blue-green algae, and your imagination. The coastline is dotted with tropical reefs, rare vegetation, and enchanting caves, the most famous of which, the Blue Grotto, discovered in 1826 by a German writer named August Kopisch who obviously had nothing better to do with his time than ride around looking for grottos, is the very symbol of Capri, and its most famous tourist attraction. Two peaks, Mount Tiberio in the east and Mount Solaro in the west, rise up into the sky and make Capri more than just a one-dimensional semitropical getaway. The Marina Grande, where the traghetti dock is, is a waterfront area with a bunch of souvenir shops, restaurants, scooter rental places, and a few hotels, one of which we’d be staying at, the Villa Maresca. But even the few cheesy souvenir kiosks can’t take away from the marina’s quaint charm, due mostly to the old-timers scattered along the docks and chattering away, and the classic wooden fishing boats in every conceivable pastel color that are moored in the harbor, gently swaying in the calm, warm aquamarine water. We checked into the Villa Maresca. It was a four-star hotel–the first we’d stayed in so far–with stark white-tile floors, satellite TV, a comfortable queen bed, a large marble shower stall, and a deck that overlooked the marina. We could even see all the way back across the bay to the Sorrentine Coast, and while we had no desire to gaze back at the open sore that is Naples itself, scraping the clouds to the south of the city we could see Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that got all upset about something way back in A.D. 79 and buried a whole bunch of people in ash and molten lava. If you ignored the image of charred, mummified bodies, which couldn’t help but spring to mind as you gazed at Vesuvius from the balcony, the hotel and Capri in general couldn’t have been a more perfect spot to celebrate Celia’s thirtieth.

After getting settled in, we learned that there were two ways to get up to the town center of Capri, which was located higher up in the hills between the two peaks, Tiberio and Solaro: you could drive up the winding, twisting roads in one of the island’s famous topless cabs (which, to my chagrin, meant a cab without a roof rather than one driven by a buxom local signora with no bikini top) or you took the funicolare, a little tram car which ascended on a track which cut straight up the mountainside at about an ninety-degree angle. Still suffering from a bit of carsickness and vertigo from our drive through the Alps a month before, we went with the funicolare, and arrived on top to see the epitome of the quaint, classic piazza. Groups of local men stood together in circles, chatting, smoking, and laughing, while nearby their wives commiserated amongst themselves and tried to wrangle the countless children who ran in and out of legs and around the cobbled piazza. It’s more of a small private courtyard than a piazza, and is surrounded by stores, cafés, an old clock tower and the church of San Stefano, the Patron Saint of Processed String Cheese. (I just made that up.)

Piazza Umberto is surrounded by a medieval network of tiny streets and narrow alleyways in which we immediately got lost and, naturally, began arguing. Every street seemed to go uphill, no matter which direction we walked in, and combined with the sun, which had finally come out, we were overheated, thirsty, and tired. We couldn’t find our way back to Piazza Umberto for the life of us. As we wearily hiked past villas tucked into mountainsides and hidden down narrow alleys, I had terrible flashbacks from Innsbruck and the search for the lost Moped, but suppressed them lest I hurl my wife off a cliff, which she no doubt was thinking about doing to me. But I looked on the bright side: at least we weren’t dragging that God-forsaken fridge-on-wheels with us this time, and hey, we were in one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen, how bad could things really be? Finally, we made it to the top of a hill and found that we’d accidentally stumbled upon one of the island’s main tourist attractions, Villa Jovis. It’s Capri’s largest ancient imperial villa, built for Tiberius, who succeeded Caesar Augustus, who originally bought the island from the Greeks, who were responsible for the name Capri in the first place, calling it "Kapros," meaning "wild boar" (there’s that word again). As a gift to the twelve Gods on Mount Olympus, he had twelve villas built in their honor, the largest and most majestic of which was Villa Jovis, from where he ruled the Roman Empire. If you could rule the empire from a sprawling, peaceful, secluded villa on a cliff overlooking the sea rather than an imperial palace in crowded Rome where senators, servants, and even your own relatives were constantly plotting to poison or stab you, I think you’d go with the villa, too.

Legend also has it that Tiberius, a notorious insomniac, would walk the streets all night long, fully decked out in his imperial robes and jewels, wandering between the twelve villas, which he conveniently kept stocked with nubile young girls and boys in order to satisfy his twisted sexual desires and help pass his sleepless nights. (And we thought Clinton and Monica was scandalous.) Villa Jovis is (approximately) a twenty-two-thousand-square foot home with countless different floors and levels built into the natural downward slope of the mountainside, about 130 feet separating the highest and lowest points of the house. Gardens cover practically the entire area of the hillside on which it’s built. There’s a large open area with giant urns that were used to catch the rainwater, which was the only source for drinking water and the water for the many baths. Ramps, walkways, and stairways connect the imperial quarters to the rest of the house, and a huge balcony overlooks the Bay of Naples. There is also a group of ruins that are believed to be the observatory for the Imperial Astrologer, (who perhaps wrote horoscopes like "With Mars in retrograde, you will be unable to sleep again this month and will therefore have orgies with young boys and girls"). The villa also contains its own church, the Church of San Maria del Soccorso. And finally, there are also ruins of a signal tower used to communicate with Rome via a chain of lighthouses up the coast. (The place was enormous, like MC Hammer’s house on "VH1: Behind the Music" but without Hammer’s stadium-seating movie theater, bowling alley, recording studio and solid gold statue of Hammer himself.) After the tour, we found our way back to Piazza Umberto and, after a drink at an outdoor café, went back down to Marina Grande on the funicolar to a restaurant that the hotel had recommended.

Most of the restaurants were back up off the Piazza Umberto, but one good one was in the marina, called Da Ronaldo, and was a simple place that apparently served up some of the best seafood in town. Capri, while being the birthplace of the legendary caprese salad of mozzarella and tomato, is also home to some of the tastiest seafood you’ll find in all of Italy. And after not eating much all day, we attacked the bounty of the ocean around Capri with full force: marinated salmon crostini appetizers, spaghetti with fresh clams, mussels, calamari and shrimp, sea bass in lemon and extra vergino olive oil, washing it all down with the house red, which was, as always, smooth and delicious. As we leaned back and decompressed from yet another delectable culinary marathon, the man at the next table leaned over.

"Excuse me," he said, "sorry to interrupt. I couldn’t help hear–you guys American?"

Celia, who was facing their table, nodded, and I turned around to see a prototypical preppy American sailing duo in their mid-fifties.

The man had thinning, windswept gray hair and wore a navy blue Polo shirt underneath a dark green Nautica windbreaker whose sleeves were pulled up to his elbows, exposing thick, tanned, hairy Popeye forearms. The woman was right out of Eddie L.L. Bean central casting, with the three essential P’s–petite, preppy and perky, with a Dorothy Hamill-ish haircut and the most perfect, white teeth I’d ever seen. She wore a matching, dark green Nautica windbreaker. They were the living cover of Retired Sailor Illustrated, if such a magazine exists.

Alan and Amy were their names. They were from Glastonbury, CT and had arrived in Capri just that morning. Compared to our friends and family, we were the wild, adventurous ones. But we quickly discovered that the world is chock full of interesting, adventurous people whose exploits and tales made our adventures look relatively conservative. They had sailed from Glastonbury to Virginia, Virginia to Bermuda, Bermuda across the Atlantic to the Azores, from the Azores around Spain and Gibraltar into the Mediterranean to Mallorca and Menorca, Ibiza, Corsica, Sardinia, Elba (where Napoleon was exiled). They were now doing Capri and Amalfi before hitting Malta, which would be their last stop before flying back home for Christmas. Then, after the Holidays they’d fly back to Malta and sail the boat home to Connecticut. And they were doing it all alone, just the two of them, in a 43-foot boat. Talk about your quality time. At least when Celia and I got sick of each other, we could leave the apartment and walk around Florence. But these two were trapped belowdecks like two mice under the floorboards, and if they wanted to get away from each other where could they go? Nowhere. There was ocean all around. They weren’t in marriage boot camp, like Celia and I often joked we were. They were imprisoned on the Devil’s Island of marriage. There was no escape.

As we paid our check, Celia and I were feeling that familiar, giddy buzz we’d felt that night in the Tegernsee beer hall–a happy feeling caused by a mixture of booze and good will toward new friends. Still, we were ready to say "It was nice to meet ya" and call it a night when Alan said, "Hey, why don’t you guys come back for a drink? We can show you the boat." Grinning, he turned to Amy for confirmation. She smiled. Damn, look at all those white teeth. Is it possible for a human to have more than 32 teeth?

"It’s a little messy," Amy shrugged, "but if you guys don’t mind, I’m sure game! We do have some Amaretto we have to finish. But it’s ok if we all get a little tipsy, we’re on vacation!"

Good God, they’re swingers! Just our luck. Here we meet two kind people, have pleasant conversation, share a little wine, and just like that they turn out to be goddamn swingers! I couldn’t tell whether Celia was thinking the same thing I was, but, not wanting to be rude, we accepted their invitation. The whole way across the marina to the boat, however, I kept my ass cheeks clenched tightly together while thinking about what I had in my pockets that could be used as a weapon if necessary.

Persistence was a forty-three-foot Norwegian windjammer x320, with a top speed of 100 knots and a fully extendable automatic jib, three automatic Calphalon masts and–ok, I’m obviously full of shit. I don’t know a thing about boats and never will. I don’t remember a single thing Alan said about what type of boat Persistence was exactly. All I know is that most of it was made of white fiberglass, it had lots of wood and brass on the deck, was forty-three feet long, had one of those giant spoky steering wheels, and had two huge sails with a complex network of ropes and pulleys that would no doubt cost me a finger if I ever tried to operate them. Belowdecks consisted of a small main living room/kitchen/dining area, a two-bunk room for any crew they pick up, a storage room filled with life rafts, life preservers, extra gas tanks, and supplies of all sorts near, a bathroom and a master bedroom and bath. As Celia and I slid into the pleather, half-moon-shaped booth, a nautical version of a booth you might find in a jazz lounge, Amy lifted up a little hidden trap-door in the tabletop that held thrie plastic silverware and cups. "Heeeere we are!" she chirped happily, and–despite expecting her to pull out a ball gag, leather hood, handcuffs, and video camera–pulled out a plastic covered sleeve of Nyquil-sized shot glasses.

While she rummaged through the well-stocked liquor cabinet, pulled out bottles, and began lining them up on the table, Alan gave us a crash course on all the nautical navigation and communications technology they had on board–GPS, radar, sonar, short wave, and other beeping, glowing, humming machines whose names I can’t remember. They also had plenty of entertainment equipment to keep from going insane on the high seas– email, CD and DVD player, VCR.

"But enough of this nerdy stuff," Alan laughed and shut the panel over the entertainment center. He then turned around and, unless it was my imagination, leered at us and said "It’s time to party."

Whoah nelly....did he say ‘party’? Dear God, he did! He used party as a verb! Only two kinds of people use party as a verb–stoners, and swingers–and Alan sure as hell wasn't wearing a Phish T-shirt. I knew it. I fucking knew it! We’d been lured aboard the SS Wife-swapper by a couple of leering, big-teethed swingers!

As my ass cheeks clenched so tightly that I thought I’d cut off oxygen to my brain, Celia and scootched closer together as Amy and Alan sat down on either side of us–Alan next to Celia, Amy next to me, two swinging bookends, trapping us. Amy lined the Nyquil cups, filled them one by one with Amaretto, and handed them out.
"To new friends, new adventures and new experiences," she said, holding her shot in the air and grinning, as if she could do anything but grin with those choppers.

The four of us touched Nyquil cups and promptly knocked them back. I didn’t taste any crushed-up roofies, which was good, and neither had played footsie with us yet, so maybe they weren’t swingers after all. Amy filled up another round and we slammed them down. I looked at Celia, but if she was thinking what I was, she didn’t show it. She was happily chatting with both of them as if we’d known them all our lives.

Soon enough, over the course of a few more bizarre-liquor rounds, my suspicions slowly dissipated. They weren’t pervs; they were just friendly people. Yes, Mark, I started telling myself, it is possible for people to be friendly without wanting anything from you. And even if they were swingers, what an ego on me to assume they’d want to swing with the likes of us!

We stayed for about two hours, in all. They brought out albums of their kids. They talked about family, and their travels. They talked about marriage, and, because they were officially morphing from dirty old swingers to wise old sages as time passed, I realized that it was great to hear their thoughts on marriage. They’d each been through the marriage trenches–Alan had been married twice before, Amy three times–so it was interesting to hear their take on me and Celia, and that was this: we’d chewed off an incredible amount at once by getting married, quitting our jobs, and moving to Florence, all in one shot. It was far more than most young married couples try to tackle in a lifetime, let alone a few short months. We shouldn’t worry about all the little battles we’d been having.

"Fights are good for you," Amy said matter-of-factly at one point, sipping some brown liqueur that looked like chocolate milk. "They purge any lingering crap that might otherwise fester if you just went through life pretending everything’s hunky-dory. You’ve got to take off the gloves every now and then."

"Amen," Alan agreed from across the cabin, where he’d gone to tinker with some nautical stuff (not the technical term) and gently tap the barometer on the wall with his index finger. "And don’t let that smile fool you, kids. That one there"–he smiled and pointed at Amy–"can fight the best of them. I always keep the guns locked up."

She rolled her eyes and ignored him. "You kids just stick with it and don’t let the bad times get you down. Look where you are right now, drinking on a yacht in Capri with a couple of old coots from Connecticut. Where would you rather be, at home watching TV?" She then smiled, winked, and gulped down her shot.

Those two hours we spent on Persistence with Alan and Amy recharged our marital batteries. Maybe it was my other new friends–Tia Maria and Frangelica–doing the thinking, but, sitting there in the cabin, I couldn’t help think that people like these kept showing up in our lives just when we needed them the most. First Thomas the Ultimate Bavarian, Moshir, and Anna the Kickboxing Champion. And now Alan and Amy here in Capri. The world was truly a strange, amazing place. Before leaving, we exchanged email addresses. Unlike the Bavarian gang, we heard from Alan and Amy when we returned to Florence; they were on their way to Malta. Wherever they are now, I hope they’re doing well, and want to say thanks for your hospitality, your sage marital advice, and for not wanting to swing with us.

Wait, did I just use "swing" as a verb? Uh-oh.

The next day was absolutely flawless, not a cloud in the sky–getting tired of hearing that yet?–and around seventy degrees. It would be perfect for what we had planned: renting a scooter and touring around the entire island. That’s really the only way to see every inch of Capri, by scooter. So we walked to one of the places in Marina Grande, and after signing waivers and contracts which release them from all liability after I inevitably drove the scooter off a cliff or into the grill of an oncoming tour bus, we donned our goofy, oversized helmets and zoomed up the mountain on the double-Vespa, me driving, Celia hanging on for dear life behind me. (Note: no mater how hard you try, there is simply no way to look cool and/or sexy in an oversized moped helmet. No way. Just accept it as fact and move on.)
Now, for a quick story about my childhood that is related to our time on Capri, I promise: When I was four, I once rode my tricycle around our whole neighborhood completely naked. My brother Doug and his evil friend Gary had told me that if I did it, I’d get to join their "special club." Being fairly clever for a preschooler, before agreeing to the ride, I pointed to Gary’s sister, Maria, who stood nearby, and said "What about her? She’ll see me." Without hesitation, Doug and Gary said, "Oh she can’t see you. She has fake plastic eyes." That seemed perfectly reasonable, so I stripped down, hopped on the giant red trike, and took off. Down Alba Road, onto Wall Street, down Wall, back onto the other end of Alba, in about five minutes I was almost all the way around the block. And I was hauling ass, too–literally–burning up the asphalt at a sound barrier–shattering seven, eight m.p.h. After all, I wanted to hurry back and see the special clubhouse and meet the other distinguished members as soon as possible. But about two hundred yards from my house, a car pulled into my peripheral vision, barely moving beside me, the driver’s window rolled down. A black and white car.

"Good afternoon, Mr. St. Amant," Officer Tracy called over to me. All the kids knew Officer Tracy, and he knew all of us kids. He was the nice, retired officer who came to all the schools and talked to us about safety issues: looking both ways before crossing, not talking to strangers, stuff like that. He never mentioned not riding your bike around the block naked, though.

"Hi, Officer Tracy." I waved quickly at him, still pedaling away, pushing harder now because the last stretch toward my driveway was uphill.

I’ll never forget what he said next. "Don’t you think you’re going to catch a cold?"

I told him I was riding naked to join a club with my brother and Gary, but when we arrived at the driveway, the front lawn was empty. Doug, Gary, Maria were nowhere to be seen. They had ditched after, I now know, seeing me getting a police escort up the street. There was no club. I had been completely fucking duped. While there was a tinge of embarrassment and disappointment, it was also strangely liberating. Who else in the neighborhood had the balls to ride around naked? No one, that’s who. I was a pioneer, a trailblazer, and had struck a blow for naked bike riders everywhere! The reason I bring this up at all is that I hadn’t experienced such an overwhelming feeling of total freedom again until that day in Capri, when my wife and I zipped up and down the windy mountain roads on our double-Vespa. Granted, we weren’t naked. But still, I hadn’t felt so unchained, liberated, and so far away from what my life was supposed to be in a long, long time. The sun was out. The flowers were blooming. We were thousands of miles away from everyone we knew and, more importantly, anyone who could find us. Celia was holding me tightly around my waist. It was perfect! We rode to the Marina Piccola (little marina), on the south side of the island, which was a good fifteen degrees warmer than the north side and had a spectacular view of the faraglioni, the famous giant rocks that stick up out of the sea like tiny little dormant volcanoes. We rode up a winding, treacherous pass to the other town center on the island, Anacapri, a tranquil little village with handmade tile shops and cafés, and made our way back down the other side of the island to the Blue Grotto. We didn’t know if it was open, it being November and all, but it was such a beautiful day the guy at the scooter shop said there might be a few boats doing tours. Normally, there are little rowboats that can take two or three people at a time through a small opening in the cave, all of whom have to lie down in the bottom of the boat so they don’t crack their heads on the stalagmite. The "blue" part of the grotto’s name comes from an eerie blue glow throughout the cave caused by sunlight that shines through an underwater opening somewhere and reflects off the water. In the early days, the grotto was avoided by the locals due to legends of witches and sea monsters living there, but now it’s the most famous tourist attraction on the island, and you can’t keep people out–unless the seas are rough, in which case it’s closed. Which it was the day we pulled up on the Vespa. Shit. But it was just as fun to ride around the island without any real plans whatsoever, and that’s exactly what we did for about eight straight hours until dinnertime. We even ran into Alan and Amy, who had also rented scooters and were doing the same thing we were. Except they drove separate Vespas. They were relationship experts. But while separate scooters were no doubt one small key to a successful partnership (as separate beds probably are later on), Celia and I were surprisingly content sharing the same one and the clingy "togetherness" that came with it. I could barely remember the times when I had wanted to crush her with our fridge-suitcase. Maybe we were making strides after all? We even got lots of great video and pictures to make sure we never forgot that wonderful day in paradise, goofy helmets or no goofy helmets. In fact, I can’t wait to come to your house and show you the multimedia presentation of our entire trip–videos of each country, digital and traditional pictures of everything under the sun, and, of course, a full digital slideshow featuring all the best shots from our months abroad. It should only take about seven hours. How’s this Tuesday sound?

That night, November 18, I was faced with the second leg of the thirtieth-birthday celebration. If you remember, any successful birthday for a woman must be a three-pronged attack: the perfect place, the perfect dinner, and the perfect gift. Prong 1 was complete: Capri was amazing, unforgettable. Now I had to figure out Prong 2: where to go for dinner. While Celia napped, I asked down at the desk where they might recommend a worried husband take his wife for her thirtieth birthday. Without hesitation, the very helpful woman recommended a restaurant back up the mountain off Piazza Umberto. She warned that it was very pricey, but the most exquisite food on the island, and the atmosphere was very romantic, she assured me with a conspiratorial look. I said it had better be, because I was seriously worried about how I’d handled Prong 3: the Gift.

"What did you buy for present," she asked politely, in accented but perfect English, "if you do not mind me asking?" I didn’t want to tell her. By that point I already knew that I had botched the Gift in a big way, so telling another woman what I’d gotten would only anger her, perhaps cause her to call my wife right at that very moment, wake her up, and advise her to leave me for a man who didn’t buy asinine birthday gifts. But I told her anyway. And while she didn’t call Celia and tell her to divorce me, she didn’t look too pleased. I even thought I saw her wince. But all she said was "I see. Well, the restaurant is excellent, at least that she will not forget."

She was absolutely right about the restaurant. It was hidden down a narrow alleyway off Piazza Umberto, and we had the place practically to ourselves. We were seated right at eight p.m. at a lovely table covered in a thick white linen cloth, decorated with silver and fine crystal, and situated right next to a roaring fireplace. Soft Italian music played in the background. The room was small but cozy, and had a little window through which you see into the kitchen and watch the chef working his magic over flaming stoves and boiling pots. It was like we were special guests in the dining room of someone’s private Italian villa. There was only one other party there that night in fact, two large, very well-dressed older men and an attractive younger women in a black dress and pearls. I thought for sure they were mafiosi, and she was one of their mistresses. The Mafia is still alive and well in Italy, despite the rumors to the contrary, and few places is it more prevalent than in Naples, as corrupt a city as it is dirty. They were impeccably groomed, talking on cell phones, and relishing their wine and food–they were Napoletano gangsters, no doubt about it. Then again, this is how most Italians behave at dinner, so maybe I’m just talking out of my ass. Our tall, skinny waiter was basically at our beck and call for two hours, and was very gracious and friendly the whole time. He even casually chatted with us in Italian as he stoked the fire, as if we were just friends who happened to pop by. The meal, as the woman at the hotel had promised, was absolutely amazing in that artistically presented kind of way. Every dish looked so fastidiously designed on the plate that you felt sort of bad eating it right away, as if you were soiling a priceless piece of art with a clumsy jab of your fork. But in the end, it was food more than anything else, and it was delicious. We both stuck with the fresh seafood for which Capri is legendary, and every piece of fish, every clam, every succulent chunk of lobster simply melted in our mouths. I even tried a marinated polpi salad–polpi, as our Mafiosi friends from the next table kindly leaned over to explain when they heard me asking about it, was "How you say, weeth the many arms, the aneemal under the water?"

"Octopus?" I guessed.

"Si, si," they all roared with delight, clapping and toasting us with their massive red wine goblets. "Si, yes, polpi ees the octopus."

The larger of the two men, obviously the Godfather, kissed the tips of his fingers and then held them out to us and reverentially shook them in that special way Italians have to show they truly love something. "Ees deleeshus the way they make-a de octopus. You try the insalata polpi, no? Ees molto deleeshus, you love eet." Yes, I try, I told them, thank you, I try indeed. Who was I to turn down the unsolicited dining advice of ruthless gangland overlords? Mobsters usually ate quite well–these guys definitely did, judging by the sheer size of them–and being from Naples they no doubt knew what they were talking about when it came to seafood. So I had the insalata polpi and it was spectacular. Even the simple things, like the steaming hot rolls and the olive oil, tasted just a little better than any we’d had thus far. From start to finish, everything was perfect. We even strayed from our usual choice of the house red wine and decided on a bottle of Montalcino Chianti the waiter had recommended, and it, too, was just a little bit better than any wine we’d had in our lives. About halfway through the meal, the waiter informed us that if we wanted the chocolate soufflé for dessert, we’d have to order it now, because the chef would need time to prepare it. Now, I’ve always declined the soufflé whenever I’ve been in a fancy place and had the opportunity to try one. I’ve never considered myself a soufflé guy, someone who would eat a dessert that takes almost an hour to prepare. But this was the time to live the kind of life we never expected to live, to experience new and amazing things that we never would have experienced otherwise, and that included desserts. We’d throw caution to the wind, live on the edge, boldly go places our palates had never gone before–Mark and Celia St. Amant, adventurous world travelers, were going to order the soufflé! So dammit, I did order that soufflé, and, well, to tell you the truth, the ordering it was a little anticlimactic. It involved considerably less flamboyant pomp and circumstance than I had imagined, and was really nothing more than me saying, "I’ll have the soufflé" to the waiter. But still, it felt good to be so far from home and ordering such an exotic dessert.

However, something got lost in translation between our tall skinny waiter friend and the chef. We finished the long, leisurely meal at about eleven p.m.–a full three hours after we’d sat down, and a good hour and a half after ordering the dessert–and the soufflé still had not made its grand entrance. As we finished our coffee, no soufflé. As we drank more water and looked around the room for the 576th time that evening, no soufflé. As the mobsters and their date bid us a polite arrivaderci and left–still, no soufflé. We sat there, alone in the dining room, a little confused about what was going on.

"We did order the soufflé, right?" It seemed like so long ago that I honestly couldn’t remember. Though my watch said we’d been there three hours, it felt like more. My hair was now a very distinguished gray, and sometime between our second and third cups of coffee I had managed to impregnate Celia , who carried the baby to full term and delivered a baby boy right on the dinner table. Cole Frederick St. Amant, we named him, and Celia now cradled him in her arms as she struggled to stay awake. "I could sworn, all those months ago, we ordered the soufflé."

"I don’t know anymore," she replied, clearly very tired by this point, perhaps from eating, drinking and giving birth. "What day is it?"

"This is crazy." I looked at my watch again. It read 11:22. And the date said the eighteenth. But November 18 of what year, that was the question? Not that we minded a leisurely dinner. Within our first meal or two after moving here we learned that the Italian custom was a long, drawn out meal, without all the hectic rushing and food-shoveling and pressure from the restaurant to hurry hurry hurry so they could turn the table over, like happens so often in America. And we had gotten quite used to taking our time at dinner and enjoying the marvelous food, the wine, and the company in true dolce vita fashion, especially in such a nice place. But this was insane. There had to be a hidden camera somewhere.

Almost another full hour had passed since the waiter last checked on us. It was near midnight now. Not only had he disappeared–or died–but there was still a glaring absence of a chocolate soufflé anywhere in our general vicinity. And the chef obviously wasn’t cooking anything. How do I know that? Because I could see into the kitchen through the little window where he had once placed our steaming hot meals thirteen years ago, and saw him there, not stirring or saucing or baking. Rather, I saw him hopping. Seriously, he hopped right by the little window, obviously on one foot because he was holding his other shoe up in the air. I watched with growing disbelief. He hopped over to the dishwashing area, grabbed the overhanging spray-hose thing, and started washing something off his shoe, turning it over and over, holding it up close to his face for inspection and then spraying it some more. Pretty soon, his sous chef, a plump younger woman, came over to marvel the cleaned shoe, which he held up triumphantly. They smiled at each other as if they’d just discovered the cure for cancer, and she exited off to the side once again while he bent down, disappearing under the window for a second, and then reappeared, smiling down at the newly cleaned shoe that was ready for more walking, standing, or whatever else he was going to do on his feet besides cook our soufflé. But then he must have felt me watching him because he turned toward me, his smile disappeared, and, as if caught doing something very naughty, he quickly sidestepped out of view. The face of his sous chef appeared in the window for a moment to confirm that I had indeed watched them clean a shoe in the same kitchen where they had prepared our food, caught my eye, and then quickly disappeared off to the side again. I suddenly felt like I was watching a silent Chaplin movie.

"So let me get this straight," I said to Celia slowly, rubbing my eye sockets with my palms, trying to work it all out in my head to make sure I hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing. "Instead of making our soufflé, the chef and his little assistant were cleaning his shoe."

"Seems that way," she replied, clearly defeated. (At least our newborn son had disappeared, meaning it was a hallucination after all.) "Let’s just tell them we don’t want it."

"Damn right, we don’t," I said in my best indignant American tone of voice as I stormed off to track down our wayward server. But deep down, I did still want that soufflé. We were adventurers living in Italy and I was having a fucking soufflé if it killed me. The search didn’t take long. I found our tall skinny friend in a DJ booth of sorts right next to the hosts’ stand, slumped in front of the restaurant’s stereo system and casually looking at CD cases. He wore a pair of headphones–headphones that had a nice long cord with which I could have easily garroted him, I couldn’t help but notice, but I fought the urge. I tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped, completely startled, and turned around, removing the headphones.

"Si, signor?"

In my most clear Italian to date, I calmly explained that we’d ordered the soufflé approximately three weeks ago and wondered if it was coming out anytime soon.

"Tre ori," (three hours) he smiled, thinking he was being helpful by correcting my vocabulary, "no settimane. Tre ori fa." (Not weeks. Three hours ago).

"Oh no," I corrected him back in Italian, "I meant three weeks. You can tell the chef that we don’t want the soufflé. Sorry. And could we please have the conto." The dreaded Conto Dance would be another battle, but I didn’t even want to think about that.

The waiter, very clearly having forgotten to place the soufflé order at all, attempted to make it seem as if it was I who was at fault. In near perfect English, he said, "You are on dee vacation, no? Relax, sit by dee fire, drinka dee wine, I bring soufflé very soon."

That was it. Being told to relax when that’s all we’d been doing for the past I don’t know how many hours was all I could stand. I responded as calmly as possible through gritted teeth. "We have been relaxing, signor, for almost five hours. We drank gallons of water. I looked at the photography around the dining room so much I have memorized it. My wife gave birth to a baby boy. And all the while the chef was cleaning his shoe in the sink, which leads me to believe he is not putting the final touches on our soufflé, which you and I both know was never ordered in the first place. Now give us our goddamn conto before I wrap those headphones around your neck, drag you into the kitchen, dip the chef’s shoe in olive oil, light it on fire, and shove it up your lazy, stupid, no-dessert-ordering ass!"

Actually, I didn’t say any of that. I was too tired. He did have the balls to tell me to relax and enjoy my nice Italian dinner because I was on vacation, and I did say under my breath that we had relaxed and enjoyed it for the first three hours, but were now developing liver spots, but that was about it. He assured me that the soufflé should be coming out any minute, and then, after a monet’s hesitation, sprinted into the kitchen. I walked back to the table, giving Celia a weak thumbs-up on the way. She just shut her eyes and moaned when I told her they were finally making the soufflé. "Did you ask why are we being held prisoner here? We didn’t do anything wrong, did we?"

"I don’t know," I said, looking in through the little window at the waiter, who was now gesticulating angrily at the shellshocked chef, who scrambled around the kitchen grabbing pans, cracking eggs, and stirring things. The two of them occasionally turned and looked out into the dining room at us to make sure I hadn’t thrown the furniture on the fire for revenge. "He told me to relax. I hate when people tell me to relax when all I’ve been doing is relaxing." She patted my hand and smiled. "Let’s just accept it as being punished for something awful we did in a past life. But you know what? Even with shoe boy in there, and the soufflé incident, it’s the best birthday dinner I’ve ever had. Thank you." And then she picked up my hand and kissed it. Maybe I was just sleep-deprived, but it almost made me cry. Especially when thinking about how she’d feel after seeing my gift. Chances are, she wouldn’t be gently kissing my hand and thanking me.

Nearly forty minutes later, the waiter proudly brought out our chocolate soufflé and placed it down on the table as if this was exactly the way it was supposed to have happened all along. "Buon appetito," he said, smiling at us and backing away graciously, probably fearing that if he turned his back on us we’d jab forks into him. So at 12:45 a.m., nearly five hours after we’d sat down for dinner, we sullenly, unenthusiastically started digging into our dessert–tired, pissed off, already hating it. Which makes it all the more frustrating that with every bite, we discovered that the chocolate soufflé was the absolutely, positively, hands-down, most unbe-fucking-lieveable dessert I’d ever had in my life. It was a taste orgy. I wanted to hate it but it just wasn’t possible. Damn the Italians and their unmatched skill with food! Damn the shoe-cleaning chef who could whip up an otherworldly treat in the blink of an eye! In the end, as much as we wanted to, as much as the waiter pushed us with his careless service, we just couldn’t leave angry and unsatisfied.

Full of chocolate and the high that comes with it, we found our way out of the dark maze of alleys leading to Piazza Umberto, grabbed a cab (the funicolare was long closed by this time) and made it back to the hotel. And though we were tired, before we went to sleep, I had to complete the dreaded third and final prong of the birthday process: the Gift. Now, I’ve already told you I screwed the gift up in a big way, so I’ll spare you the minor details and just spit it out: I got her stationary. In the end, the birthday trifecta was beyond my grasp. I flew too close to the sun. Sure, Capri itself was a home run. And the dinner–other than the gargantuan block of time it removed from our lives, which I would like back on my deathbed–was also a huge hit. But the gift was an utter bomb. It went over like a fart in church, as Joe from Milan is fond of saying. I guess I just panicked. Florence is renowned for its homemade paper, so I wanted to give her something to remind her of our time there. Of course I completely disregarded two very important facts that would have indicated that stationary was not the smartest choice: 1) Celia isn’t a big letter-writer and 2) even if she were a big letter-writer, stationary is the kind of thing you give away to other people and eventually run out of, so in time she’d have no stationary left with which to remember Florence. But in my defense, considering we spent just about every waking moment together, I really didn’t have any alone time to do much covert shopping, so when I passed the stationary store that day while coming back from getting some bread for lunch, on impulse alone I just went in and the rest is bad birthday history. And let’s just leave it at that and move on, shall we? Celia was able to, and that was no easy feat I assure you. When she opened her gift only to reveal a box of stationary, of all things, she did what any kind woman would do in that situation: she lied. She said she loved it, and gave me a big hug and a kiss. That, I thought, was nice of her, even if she clearly didn’t mean it. And one of these days I’m going to make it up to her and surprise her with something appropriate for a thirtieth birthday. Like Celtics tickets. Just kidding. I’m stupid, but I’m no masochist. I’ve learned from my mistakes.

Which is why when I finish this last sentence, I’m calling Canyon Ranch to see if they have gift certificates.

©2002 Mark St. Amant, All Rights Reserved