Guess what? Another day of moving between cities, going from Firenze to Ischia, another day of rain. We’re lucky in the sense that the rain in Florence was nice enough to pour while we were having breakfast and after we left the city, so no raincoat required.
We had planed for a healthy margin between our train‘s arrival in 📍Napoli Centrale and our ferry’s departure from 📍Napoli’s Porto. A little over one hour and a half, and a good thing too. Our train cumulated delays at every stop, eating half of our transfer window. Add to that the 2 kilometres between the train station and the ferry terminal made on Naples’s metro line, and we arrived just as they started boarding our ferry.
The mad sprint to our ferry did reminded us that we’re in the south of Italy. Things run with a margin of error and no predictability. Take Naple’s metro as an example. You might think that it runs every so many minutes, like every 5 or 10 minutes. It does not. The posted schedule, not that it represents reality, will show a random assortment of departures varying between 5 and 17 minutes. The type of margin that can make the difference between catching and missing your boat.
We made it to 📍Ischia, checked in to our “sea front apartment” that’s two entire city blocks from the beach but has a large comfortable balcony and, being on the top floor of the building, affords us a good view of the Mediterranean none the less. We chucked up the misleading description to an error in translation and moved on.
Being able to travel without actually getting rained on came at a price it would seem. Karma is a prickly thing and decided to make it up to us in the form of torrential rain. We had to walk less than a kilometre to our dinner and managed to get soaked while wearing raincoats. I’m pretty sure we swam more than we walked. The diner itself was OK and should have come with a wonderful view but with all the rain and the abnormally high tides that brought water levels flush with the pier in front of the restaurant, and all the boats in port we had a very dim view of boat asses. A sort of maritime peep show but without the need to pay for the added ambiance. We swam back home and called it a night.