But for every strenuous afternoon there were tranquil evenings, like spending one night at the Caesar Augustus overlooking the turquoise blue waters of the Adriatic Sea. It’s here that we begin to find our travel rhythm. As she gets ready in the morning, I trot down to the hotel’s cliffside gym. Later, we spend the afternoon at the iconic hotel’s idyllic pool (me taking in the sun reading The Godfather, my mother under the shadow of an umbrella on her trusty iPad.)
The main entree of our trip is a handful of days in chaotic Naples, where a cavalcade of cousins kindly host us. While many of them barely speak English, somehow we all communicate just fine thanks to a mixture of Google Translate and the fact that hand gestures are as much the language of Italians as words themselves. “It’s many hot,” one cousin would moan while fanning himself, alluding to a European heatwave that was making national headlines at the time. Our first night is dinner at a long table out in their humble, paved courtyard flanked on all sides by apartments. It’s a Felliniesque scene as me and my mom find ourselves caught in an Italian crossfire of passionate conversation of which we can only catch one out of maybe fifty words. It was confusing. It was sweaty. I never wanted it to end.
While my mom bonds with my cousin Barbara back at the family apartment with a view of the Maradona Stadium, I hop in the car to check out a local open-air market with my cousin Fabrizio. We pick out fresh shellfish for a spaghetti alle vongole he later whips up, as good as in any quality trattoria.
On our last day in Naples, I decide to head out on my own on a sweltering Sunday afternoon. “Just relax, stay inside, everything’s closed!” I was implored by my mother and family, as if I decided on a whim to climb Everest in socks. But how often does one find themselves with free time in Napoli? I eventually bust out and wind up finding a hole-in-the-wall bar with delicious ice cold glasses of wine on draft—the perfect precursor for when they later pick me up for dinner. As we cram into a car driving down those wild streets, I turn up Pino Danile’s “Napule è” and we all sing along to its anthemic lyrics, Mount Vesuvius looming in the distance.
After teary goodbyes to our family, we hop on a Trenitalia car, unwieldy luggage and all, to the Eternal City for one final hurrah: a stay at Rome’s Hotel Hassler. It’s a special place considering Audrey Hepburn called the Hassler home when she filmed Roman Holiday. We watched the 1953 classic during pandemic-induced isolation together, when a trip like this was a distant dream. As the hotel’s doorman, complete with top hat and tails, opens the door to its opulent lobby and a piano player tinkles keys in the distance, that dream solidifies into reality.
In the evening, after we throw a coin into the nearby Trevi Fountain (as I play Frank Sinatra’s “Three Coins in a Fountain” on my iPhone), we relax on the Hassler’s terrace with spectacular views of the cityscape. I sip on a lip-smacking dirty martini and sweat bullets; today is one of the hottest in the long history of the Eternal City, yet we still take selfies on the terrace with the city’s famous landmarks in the distance—to let everybody know we got to Rome safely, of course.
But we’ve also changed over these past two weeks. Like the glasses we’d draw together to clink, we’ve grown closer thanks to a shared array of once-in-a-lifetime memories—and an ability to roll with the punches, whether that be the sweltering heat or an abundance of stairs. The latter is a welcome epiphany: The signature of the Hotel Hassler is its “ideal” location atop the mighty Spanish Steps. All 135 of them.
