The Neighbourhood

Buongiorno!

It’s Vince again - my next contribution to the blog is a description of the neighbourhood around our apartment. Before I start, here are a series of maps which should help to get you oriented.

 

As you can see, Salerno is where the Amalfi Coast begins.  The city extends farther to the southeast (right) than is shown in the 2nd map (below), which shows the older part of the city and the “centro storica”, which is really old, as in 9th – 13th century.  The blue dot is where our apartment is located.

 

The location of our place is indicated by the circle in this 3rd map and all of the surrounding area is within an easy walk of less than 10 minutes.

 

If someone in Salerno were to ask us where we are staying, we would say “a vicino de Piazza XXIV Maggio”, near (in the vicinity of) Piazza 24th of May.  The first picture is from the top end of the piazza looking down the Via Principate to the Golfo di Salerno.

 

Our street is the first on the left.  The piazza is a major bus stop on both sides of the street.  At the base of the yellow building on the right, there are a few shops and a bar.  About 50m to the right of the building, is the Supermercato.

 

In the picture above, we’re now standing at the bottom end of the piazza looking back up the hill and to the right.  Our street is in the top left corner of the picture. The building on the right, behind the bus stop, has a pizza shop and a bar. 

 

Now we are looking up the piazza to the left.  Those umbrellas you see are for the outside seating of (did you guess) another bar but this one has a great selection of food that can be taken away (of course, we did).  About 100m to the left of this bar is Mama Rosa’s, the wonderful seafood ristorante Susan wrote of earlier.

From the Piazza, this next picture looks up our street.  Our building is about 100m on the right.

 

Now down the street from our apartment.

And now up the street from the apartment

Going up the hill from our apartment, less than 3 minutes away, is the Farmer’s Market. On the walk there, one passes a bread and pasta store, a Polloria (serves chicken only, raw or roasted and assorted chicken dishes), a take-out store that has bread, dolci and prepared dishes of vegetables (We particularly liked the “melanzana parmagiana” (eggplant)) and, of course, 2 bars. A future post will describe the market and other food stores.

 

For Julie, and all of you other sweet tooths out there, these last pictures show a place right across from our building. 

It’s not very big but it has a great selection of dolci, as you can see below, and inexpensive.  Four dolce pieces will cost about 2.50€ ($3.75 CAD).  It does a steady business all week until Sunday happens. 

Not knowing about it, I arrived there early one Sunday afternoon to pick up a little dessert for dinner.  I could not get in the door!  I had to take a number (48) and stand shoulder to shoulder, 3 deep, in front of the display case.  There were 3 servers and a cashier and they were

going non-stop.   They were serving #35.  At least two customers did not even pick out what they wanted.  The server just filled a tray with about 30 various items and wrapped it up. By the time I left, I looked over at the number dispenser and saw that #65 was next.  Clearly, Sunday dinner is a dessert event in Salerno.

Now some of you might be curious to know how many bars we can walk to in 5 minutes or less.  Well, I don’t honestly know.  There is certainly more than a dozen!

Ciao for now!