Amalfi

getting to the restaurants and the families, the people who are still alive.

people with memories and people who were, you know, who were early customers or even had, you know, were vendors and, and then also going to Italy and, and going to Amalfi.

And in that time I was researching, I got married in Amalfi in Italy.

So, you know, you pray love a beats, you know,

that's great.

We see on, for example, we see on TikTok all the time, people are talking about their experiences in Positano.

So everyone's going to the Amalfi Coast and everyone wants to go to Positano, which has now become off of social media.

It has become online.

awful it has become one yeah unless you're

So so so like for so I think I use Positano because that has become an example of TikTok is almost overselling the city, overselling the town.

And it's just become way too crowded and you're missing so many other wonderful experiences.

So we were when we went to the Amalfi Coast, we skipped Positano.

We did take that drive, which I do not recommend anyone renting a car and driving themselves on the drive on the Amalfi Coast.

The Umbrella Corporation has as its logo the Maltese Cross, which is famously the symbol of the Knights of Malta.

The origin of the Maltese Cross goes back to the Crusades and actually back to Amalfi, Italy.

We actually went on our Orthodox pilgrimage to Amalfi.

That's actually where the Crusades began is in Amalfi, by the way, if you don't know that.

The Templars and whatnot.

Templar Cross.

I recently traveled to Amalfi.

I don't even remember putting this.

So we did seven days in Italy, and we had been to Italy before for our honeymoon.

We did a couple different spots in Europe, and we did stop in Amalfi.

And so when we were thinking about this trip, I was like, maybe we go to Greece, maybe we go whatever.

And I sold Caleb on Italy because there was a Formula 1 race In this town.

They overran Apulia and Calabria, notwithstanding the resistance of the popes, and proceeded to wrest Sicily from the hands of the Saracens.

They destroyed three centers of independence which shone conspicuously on that part of the Mediterranean coast which has too often been the seat of tyranny and oppression—the republics of Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi, the last of which demands our special reverence.

The traveler who visits the little fishing town squeezed in between the mountains and the sea, affording a mere niche of vantage on the iron-bound coasts between the great harbors of Palermo and Naples, finds it difficult to imagine that he sees the site of a republic which probably invented the mariner's compass, which was among the first to give laws to the commerce of the sea, and which preserved with superstitious reverence the sacred copy of the Pandects from which the knowledge of the Roman law in the Middle Ages is said to have been derived.

These southern republics disappeared forever.

I think I'll highlight two of the biggest things we did.

We did Florence for the first part of the trip and then the Amalfi Coast for the second part.

Our biggest day in Florence, we did...

We rented Vespas and rode all into the like Italian countryside, Tuscany.

It's a lovely day here in

Amalfi.

Oh, lovely part of the world.

Listen, you enjoy yourself.

That is exactly what I'm telling you.

So why on earth wouldn't I just go to a Greek island or the Amalfi Coast? What is the actual payoff that justifies this level of logistical friction?

That is the multi-thousand-dollar question.

The payoff is immense.

Factories close, offices shut down, and millions of domestic holidaymakers flood the coasts and islands.

What makes Pantelleria unique in this regard is its physical isolation and lack of mega infrastructure.

Right, because unlike Terramina in Sicily or the Amalfi towns, where crowding is driven by international tourists and massive cruise ships disgorging like 5,000 people at noon, Pantelleria doesn't get cruise ships.

The port can't handle them.