Getting to know you

The next day we got the bus up to Pontone to Maria's for lunch ... and dinner. I think we must have got the quarter past 10 and arrived about twenty or so minutes later. The bus can't actually get into the village so it stops at a point as far up the mountain as it can feasibly get. There's a sort of lay-by built into the side of the mountain that allows the bus to turn round and head on toward Scala and Ravello. From there we walked into Pontone, across the bijou little square and up to Maria's place.

Lunch was a feast - pasta followed by meat followed by vegetables followed by salad followed by fruit followed by cheese, olives, salami, chestnuts and Lord knows what else - and all washed down with vino paesano.

I love vino paesano (peasant wine). It's one of those things that should go on everybody's 'bucket list'. It's your honest-to-God basic wine made the way God intended. They crush the grapes, let the juice do its own thing for about a year and then drink it. It doesn't taste like anything that we would recognize as wine. It tastes of grapes. Now there's a thing. Maria's wine was never particularly strong (although I have drunk stuff that was much stronger) so we would happily get through two or three bottles in a sitting.

We were persuaded to stay for dinner. I have to concede that we didn't take a lot of persuading. You can keep all your fancy chefs with their fancy restaurants and their Michelin stars. I can safely say, without fear of contradiction, that I have never tasted food as good as the stuff that comes out of Maria's kitchen (is that cliché No. 2?).

Dinner was another half-a-dozen courses of ambrosia washed down with more vino paesano and all topped off with a couple of glasses of home made limoncello straight out of the freezer.

What more could any man ask for? To be sat on a roof terrace that looks out over Amalfi, the sea and the mountains eating five or six courses of heaven, drinking vino paesano and finishing with the sublime taste of home-made limoncello.

Perfection? Not quite. Neither Maria nor Luigi (both in their 60s) spoke Italian. Pure dialect. Pure Neapolitan (Neapolitan being the generic term for the dialect that is spoken in Campania, Puglia and Calabria. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and all that good stuff). The result was that they could understood every word I spoke but I understood only maybe 60% of what they said.