One weekend in late September of my senior year of college, my classmate Riley and I took an overnight bus from our school in Perugia to Nerano, a fishing village on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, forty kilometres south of Pompeii. We travelled through Friday night, stopping at a bus stop in Rome between one and five in the morning before boarding a second bus to Naples—the fastest way to reach Naples without a car and for under twenty euros per person. Neither of us were dressed for the weather in Rome—we had packed with coastal, Mediterranean days in mind rather than frigid inland nights. All indoor portions of the bus station were closed, their signs and windows black, exiling all midnight travellers to the icy concrete benches that ringed the outdoor portion of the station. My phone had died just as we’d crossed into Tuscany, and Riley had yet to buy an Italian SIM card, so our only distraction from our misery was each other.
Of all the ways to get to know a near-stranger, sitting shivering beside them at a bus stop in the middle of the night is possibly the most efficient. The cold leeched from us every ugly detail of our histories, and we rambled over old heartbreaks, shared fears, favourite foods, high school embarrassments, no subject too inane or too personal. No one around us paid us any attention—the thought that few or none of them understood English only made us bolder, more candid.
By the time we reached Naples, we’d each beaten every minute of our lives to a pulp and yet retained very little of what the other had said, both of us too delirious to truly pay attention. For all that I learned about Riley that night, I forgot almost as much, information leaking from my brain through cracks carved by sleep deprivation. Similarly, the six hours we spent in Naples waiting for a bus to Sorrento are a blur. Having missed the eight o’clock bus, we waited by the bus stop until the next—and last—bus to Sorrento came at two in the afternoon. With no working phones, no other way to tell time, and a dozen basic Italian phrases between us, we stayed beside the bus stop for fear that if we left, we’d never find our way back.
At noon, Riley ventured around the corner to a deli to buy two forearm-length sandwiches and a bag of sliced figs for lunch. Around one o’clock, gorged on mortadella and figs, we fell asleep slumped against the potted begonias that framed the heavy double-doors of the gated Sunday school across from the bus stop. We slept until an incredulous nun in full monochrome, pigeon-breasted habit shook us awake about an hour later, minutes before the last bus to Sorrento pulled into the stop. Standing in the school’s doorway, the nun shook her head and waved us off as the bus pulled away. I have never believed in God—that said, when what I can only describe as a miracle smacks me over the head while I’m passed out in a flower pot, who am I to deny her?
From Naples, Sorrento, and from Sorrento, Nerano. We took a train from the central station in Sorrento to the Sorrento Piazza Tasso station, where a line of dark blue buses circled the nearby parking lot, stretching down the block, around the corner, and out of sight. Neon signage on the front of each bus declared their destinations: Roma, Firenze, Sardinia. Everywhere and anywhere, except Nerano. No one knew where to find the bus we needed: not the ticket officer, not the tourist information desk worker, not the salesman advertising Pompeii tours for only eighty euros each. The only ones who knew, it seemed, were a flock of middle-aged French tourists waiting in line for another bus.
“Excusez-moi, messieurs-dames,” I began, only to freeze when four wary faces turned to me. Riley and I had split up in a desperate bid to find the right bus; they were busy shaking down a group of English tourists on the other side of the parking lot. “Um, savez-vous où on peut trouver l’autobus à Nerano?” Do you know where I can find the bus to Nerano?
As is the way with the French, in my experience, the first guttural “r” out of my mouth convinced them that I wasn’t American and in their relief, they suddenly became very friendly. “Oui, bien sur,” one said. Of course. “Je croix avoir vu ce bus au bout de la file, par là.” I think I saw that bus at the back of the line, that way. She pointed to where the line of buses disappeared around the block. I thanked her, shouted across the lot to Riley—in English, relishing the flinch from my new French friends—and set off to find our ride.
The bus to Nerano took us high into the coastal mountains, along winding dirt pathways that might generously be described as ‘roads’. Olive and pomegranate trees scraped along the bus’ windows. Riley pointed out flowers as they passed us in streaks of bright colour and pulled names for each of them out of the air: begonias, geraniums, birds-of-paradise. Out the window and far below us, the Tyrrhenian Sea stretched on forever into the West, framed by two stone cliffs that stood tall and straight both behind us and ahead, like a set of enormous doors opening around the water.
The cove between these cliffs and a stretch of beach-front shops between them are all that make up the village of Nerano. The cliffside overlooking the water is ridged with steps of white and beige hotels and restaurants. These ridges grow denser as they approach the beach, as though the town were sinking steadily into the sea. Along a tall stretch of cliff uphill from the beach was our hostel: a collection of boxy, pastel villas connected by wooden staircases that crisscrossed the cliff-face. From the bus stop down on the beach, the many-colored villas on the forested cliffside looked like confetti dropped onto an olive-green carpet.
Panting and sweating from the uphill trek, we checked into our villa just as the sun began its dive into the sea, around six o’clock. The villa had three rooms: a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom with two twin beds pushed against opposite walls. Each room had one window, none of which would fully close or open. No sooner had we opened the front door than Riley barged into the bedroom and fell face-first into the bed farthest from the window, groaning, their hair a black splatter on the pillow.
“Shower?” I asked, hoping they could interpret it as: do you mind if I use the shower? By this point, neither of us were capable of more than a few syllables at a time. I took Riley’s wordless grunt into their pillow to mean, no, please, go right ahead. When I finished showering, they were asleep, still fully clothed and their bed still fully made. I sat on my bed and peered out the little half-open window where Nerano unfolded below us like a pop-up picture book. Little paper villas filled the foreground, then behind them were long, pale strips of shops with their terracotta roofs aglow, then the gravel beach, then the water, too blue to be real. Above it all, the sky was flat and cloudless, its bottom dip-dyed orange and striped with the spindly masts of toy ships.
Around eight o’clock, we dragged ourselves out of bed long enough to have dinner at the second-cheapest beach-front seafood restaurant, chosen both for the price and for the folding tables set up mere feet from the tide. The waiter spoke enough English to playfully mock our attempts to order in Italian and to advise us against the calamaretti fritti (fried baby squid). “Americans don’t like it,” he told us mournfully. Naturally, we ordered the calamaretti to share between us, alongside half a litre of the cheapest wine on the menu, a plate of ricotta ravioli, and the single largest basket of French fries I have ever seen.
“Thanks for doing this with me,” said Riley as we neared the bottom of the basket.
I swallowed, laughed, “Man, thanks for inviting me. This place is…” Speechless, I gestured around us with the tiny, crispy squid in my hand. Illuminated by the yellow lamplight of the beach-front shops and restaurants, the line of little round tables marched along the shore to either side of us, all empty save for ours and one other a few yards away. Our fellow off-season tourists seated there spoke loudly enough for us to recognise American English but too quietly for us to decipher any words. Boxed in by those two enormous cliffs, the sky was a plate of blue glass that dripped into the water, the smudged border between them marked by a string of twinkling navigation lights from fishing boats and buoys. A salty wind had picked up while we ate, frothing the tide and carding through Riley’s hair. Our table’s wax paper tablecloth flapped its checkered wings wildly enough that we’d arranged our half-empty plates and carafe of wine along the table’s edge to keep our dinner from flying away. No sound carried to us over the water, only the wind and the faint clatter of dishes and scrape of dining chairs from the shops that were shutting down for the night. This is the only way I know to describe how it was to be there, hidden away in the blue shadows of the cliffs and the closing restaurants.
Riley popped a fry into their mouth and nodded, somehow understanding me, even without words. “Yeah, it really is.”
That night, neither of us could sleep. Maybe it was the anticipation of our visit to Pompeii the following day; maybe it was reluctance to let the night end. Either way, midnight saw us sneaking out of bed and down to the beach with the leftover figs from lunch (had that really been the same day?) and a bottle of two-euro wine from a 24-hour corner store near the hostel. We laid our spoils and a spare blanket on the deserted beach and huddled close under a second blanket to watch the water, where a fat slice of yellowish moon was tucked into the waves. In the dark, the cliffs that embraced the sea were barely visible, two black shapes cut out of the tissue-paper sky.
“We should come back here tomorrow morning,” said Riley.
“What, before Pompeii?” Our train to Pompeii left at eight.
“Yeah.” They settled back on their elbows. “At like, six-thirty. I want to swim in the sea at least once before we leave.”
“We could do it now.”
They shook their head and tipped it back against the blanket, shutting their eyes. “Nah, too cold. Besides, it’ll wake us up tomorrow.”
“Yeah, alright, let’s do it.” Although I hated waking up any earlier than I have to, agreeing to jump into the sea at seven A.M. was oddly easy. I felt as though the next morning, in all its unsavoury earliness, would never come. There on the beach, dwarfed by the cliffs and the wide mouth of the sea, ‘tomorrow’ was another country. I couldn’t imagine there being any more than this: the sea, the sky, the scrape of gravel on my back through the thin blanket, the pale flash of Riley’s throat in the darkness, the plastic one-litre bottle of wine wedged between us. There was too much about this moment for me to know, or ever understand. I felt like we were at that bus stop in Rome again, rattling off our entire lives only to forget every word. As I looked out over the black water to where the semi-circular moon had slowly emerged, I suddenly wished that we were other people. I wanted to be someone who could make sense of what I saw and felt instead of just experiencing it. I wanted Riley to be someone I knew, someone I could love, someone I would still speak to months from now, after we’d both left Italy and forgotten about the versions of ourselves who came together on an empty beach at midnight and watched the sea create the moon.
Eventually, when the wine was gone and the windows of the beachside restaurants had all gone dark, we climbed back up to the villa and slept. Pompeii—the purpose of our trip—was waiting. Tomorrow, we would wake at dawn and run through the rain to the beach and jump into the sea, which would be just as cold then as it was the night before. We would squeeze the brine from our hair, return the keys to our little rented villa, and board a bus to the Sorrento train station, where we’d buy two neon rain ponchos, then we’d train to Pompeii and flood into the ruins with the wave of bright-poncho-ed tourists. We would spend an hour wandering the city, taking pictures of each other in ruined palaestras and crumbling, overgrown bath houses. Then we’d board a train back to Perugia and leave behind our newest selves and whatever fleeting connection they’d found here.
All of this was yet to come. After we climbed back up to our villa, Riley took their turn in the shower while I locked the front door. Through the window by my bed, the town and the sea unwound in faded, jewel-toned layers, blues and greens. The cliffs to either side of the cove loomed like an open gateway. As I laid down to sleep, I imagined myself looking back through the windows of a departing bus to see that gate swing shut behind me, the little cove within swallowed up in the crush of stone and the sea.
