Three Italys and a Ferry

Italy reads twice. The country every traveler knows runs from Rome north, through Florence and Venice, in the order the Renaissance moved. The country south of Rome runs in the opposite direction and along a different argument. It is not one south. It is three: a volcanic Tyrrhenian face, a limestone Adriatic face, and an island that operates like its own country. The seven-day variant cannot afford all three. It chooses Naples plus Sicily and admits the omission. The ten-day variant adds the limestone interior and the heel. The fourteen-day variant lets the country reveal its layers in the order it was assembled.

Naples is dense in a way that makes the rest of Italy feel staged. Spaccanapoli cuts the old city in a straight line the Greek surveyors laid down in the fifth century BC, and the line still works. The pizza fired in eighty seconds at L'Antica Pizzeria da Michele is famous and earns it; the sfogliatella riccia at Pintauro on Via Toledo, in business since 1785, makes the better case for an unhurried breakfast. Pompeii an hour south, entered at the eight-thirty gate before the bus groups arrive, returns the city's volcanic bookkeeping with interest. The Amalfi coast drive from Salerno to Positano is famous and earns it. Capri does not. Procida, forty minutes by ferry, does.

Past Naples the country narrows. The Apennine spine drops eastward and the limestone tableland of Basilicata begins. Matera is a city built into its own canyon, a cluster of cave-houses inhabited continuously for nine thousand years and abandoned in disgrace in the 1950s before being reborn as the Italy the rest of Europe now flies in to see. The view from the Belvedere Murgia Timone at blue hour is the entire city laid out across a stone wall like a manuscript. South of there the hill town of Craco sits abandoned on a ridge after landslides in the 1960s, and the geological argument that southern Italy is a landscape that occasionally rejects human habitation stops being a metaphor.

Puglia continues east of Matera into the Itria Valley. The Valley holds the trulli, limestone cones everyone photographs at Alberobello and almost no one photographs at Locorotondo, twenty minutes north, built on a circular ridge that looks down on the valley as a whole rather than as a curated cluster. Lecce is the Baroque of the south, carved in a stone soft enough to take ornament the way wax takes a seal; the leccese pasticciotto is best at six-thirty in the morning when the bakery has just opened. Otranto sits at Italy's easternmost point, and the lighthouse at Punta Palascia is closer to Albania than to Rome.

Sicily is not the foot of the boot. It is a country the boot is kicking, and it kicks back. The ferry from Villa San Giovanni to Messina is twenty minutes and changes the grammar of the trip. Catania's fish market at six-thirty in the morning, six mornings a week under the cathedral, shouts in a Catanese that is not standard Italian and runs blood and seawater in the gutters. Ortigia, the island that holds the old city of Syracuse, has a cathedral built directly into a Greek temple from the fifth century BC, with the Doric columns still visible in the side walls. The piazza outside it goes amber-gold at five-thirty in shoulder season. Modica's chocolate, cold-processed in the manner preserved from sixteenth-century Spanish-Aztec trade, sits at the southernmost edge of where Europe still takes chocolate seriously.

What stays with you from this trip is the descent, not any single piazza. The way the volcanic ground gives way to limestone, the limestone gives way to the strait, and the strait gives way to a country that speaks a different Italian. Seven days lets you sample two faces. Ten days adds the third. Fourteen days is enough to feel that southern Italy is not one place at all.