The Vespa Gambit
I showed up in Naples with no bike skills, two suitcases, and the kind of jet-lagged audacity that gets you killed. My mate Marco had insisted the Amalfi Coast was 'basically a Sunday ride' if you had 'decent reflexes and no fear of death.' I had neither.
Then I found The BEST Private Amalfi Coast Vespa Tour The BEST Private Amalfi Coast Vespa Tour. The guide's name was Giancarlo, and he was the first person to ask if I'd ever ridden a scooter before. I lied. "Many times," I said. "Mostly drunk."
He didn't smile. "You will stay behind me. You will not touch the throttle. You will not take photographs whilst moving. You will not scream."
I screamed.
But Christ, did I live. Six and a half hours of white knuckles and jaw-clenching terror through the kind of landscape that makes Instagram feel offensive. Positano rose up in that bonkers pastel fever dream—all peachy buildings stacked like a kid's blocks on the cliff, washing lines strung between windows, and tiny gelaterie tucked into crags. We wound through villages where the streets are barely wider than the Vespa. At one point, a priest on a bicycle came the opposite direction and I genuinely considered abandoning the bike and fleeing into the sea.
Giancarlo took us through hairpins that shouldn't exist. He knew every turn by muscle memory. He told me stories—some in English, some just through aggressive hand gestures—about his grandfather running contraband down this same coast in the 1950s. By Ravello, I'd stopped being terrified and started being alive in that particular way that travel is supposed to make you feel. My hands were still shaking when we parked.
The Thermal Baptism
I needed to cool down. Not emotionally. Literally.
The next morning, still buzzing with adrenaline and espresso, I caught a hydrofoil to Vulcano, one of the Aeolian Islands off Sicily's northeast coast. The plan was simple: don't die on a scooter again. Instead, I'd signed up for a Private Tour explore Vulcano Island by Kayak & Coasteering Private Tour explore Vulcano Island by Kayak & Coasteering, which sounded either transcendent or like a good way to drown. Possibly both.
Salvatore, my guide, was a flinty Sicilian who'd grown up kayaking these waters. He took one look at my rental-shop water shoes and said, "You will slip. You will fall. This is fine."
I fell.
But not before he'd paddled me around volcanic caves sculpted by lava flows older than Christianity. The rock faces were rust-coloured and sharp, still warm beneath my fingers. We passed through grottos accessible only by water—narrow slots barely wide enough for the kayak, where the light turned the stone this otherworldly crimson. Salvatore pointed out thermal vents where the water warmed to something between a bath and a fever dream.
Then we swam. The thermal bay near Gelso had that peculiar sensation of warm water meeting sea, and I floated there—genuinely floated, muscles finally letting go—staring up at a caldera rim and thinking about all the tourists who'll never do this because they booked a catamaran cruise instead.
Salvatore fished me out when I started drifting. "You're thinking too much," he said. "This is not a day for thinking."
The Pasta Conspiracy
By the third day, I'd worked my way down to Lecce, which sits in Puglia's salento peninsula like a jewel someone buried and forgot. It's all baroque churches and honey-coloured stone and bars where old men play cards at noon.
I was supposed to rest. I had other plans.
I found Enza through a Cooking Class in an Italian Family Home: Pasta & Wine near Lecce Cooking Class in an Italian Family Home : Pasta & Wine near Lecce. Her countryside home is the kind of place where the walls have absorbed seventy years of family dinners, and the kitchen is the only room that matters.
Enza is seventy-four and has no patience for sentiment. We started with prosecco and her homemade antipasti—burrata that tasted like clouds had feelings, grilled vegetables, bread that could've been a weapon. Then she moved me to the kitchen counter with a mound of fresh flour and eggs.
"This is how my mother taught me. How her mother taught her. You will probably ruin it," she said.
I did, sort of. My hand-rolled pasta looked like something a toddler would create after a sugar crash. But Enza—who'd spent the previous hour telling me about her daughter emigrating to Toronto and her grandson who wants to be a TikTok star—took my mangled sheets of dough and boiled them anyway. We made a sauce with tomatoes she'd grown, garlic she'd aged, and a kind of casual expertise that made me realise I've been eating pasta wrong my entire life.
Then she made me eat it. And it was transcendent. Not because it was perfect—it was objectively a mess—but because I'd made it, and she'd watched me make it, and somewhere between the flour and the boiling water and her dry commentary about my life choices, something had shifted.
"You know what you need?" Enza said, pouring more wine.
"What?"
"A job. A family. Or a better therapist. You have too much energy and nowhere to put it."
The Archaeology of Adrenaline
I should've left Italy there, sated and sunburnt. But there was one more trip nagging at me—a thread I'd meant to pull.
Pompeii.
I'd read about the city a hundred times, seen the photographs, knew the story. But I booked Visit in Pompeii - Pompeii Private Tour with Ada Visit in Pompeii - Pompeii Private Tour with Ada because I didn't want the herded tourist version. I wanted someone who knew how to tell a story.
Ada met me at the entrance with an espresso and no small talk. She was sharp, fluent in three languages, and had spent her career reconstructing Roman life from ash and pottery shards. For two hours, she walked me through the major zones of the site—past the preserved homes where you could still see the grooves in stone from wooden carts, through forums where emperors' portraits crumbled on walls, into brothels where someone had carved jokes into the plaster two thousand years ago.
But it wasn't facts that got me. It was the moments she pointed to—a food shop where someone had fled during the eruption, leaving a loaf of bread half-baked. A home where a family had sheltered together. Archaeological evidence that, when you stood in front of it, wasn't evidence at all. It was just people. The same people I'd been kayaking with, cooking with, terrifying myself around on a Vespa with.
Ada talked about the preserved lives like she knew them personally. Because, in a way, she did.
Walking out of Pompeii, my chest felt tight in a way that had nothing to do with the dust and everything to do with the fact that I'd spent seventy-two hours chasing adrenaline and chaos, and what I'd actually found was the opposite: evidence that what matters most is the smallest, most ordinary things. A meal. A person who teaches you their family recipe. A guide who tells the dead like they're alive.
I caught the train back to Naples that evening, still buzzing, already planning the next trip. Italy hadn't nearly killed me. It had made me feel like living was worth the risk.
Sometimes that's the best souvenir.
