Traveling with Felicity is always a pleasure. She is incredibly organized and well researched, particularly when it comes to restaurants. She also knows how to use “apps” and things on mobile phones that completely confound me. She taps an icon on her mobile device and something positive happens. Directions are displayed and restaurants are located, hotels are rediscovered, tiny shops hidden away reveal themselves, and food markets emerge miraculously as if from nowhere. When I tap an icon on my phone, often nothing happens. This is common, particularly on a cold day, because I have such poor circulation in my fingers that the necessary warmth of a living person needed to activate the device is nonexistent in my digits, so, for just a moment or two, I know what it probably feels like to be dead. However, even when I am able to open an app, I usually don’t know how to use it, so I end up just muttering a few “Goddamn it!”s or “Stupid fucking app piece of shit” before shoving the device back in my pocket and striding forward, saying something like, “I think it’s this way!” or “It was here yesterday!”
Felicity usually responds with something subtly cynical, like, “I don’t think they moved the Pitti Palace while we slept last night, dear.”
“Colonialist,” I whisper darkly as I forge ahead into the void.
But I digress.
Felicity swiftly organized our flights to Italy, asked our hosts where we’d generally be sailing, and began a thorough online search of great restaurants in the vicinity. We flew into Naples and made our way to a marina where our friends were waiting with a small dinghy to take us to the yacht. Needless to say, we were both giddy with excitement. Now, even though I don’t swim and get seasick if a boat isn’t moving, I actually love boats and I love the sea. I also don’t like heights but have no problem going on a chairlift or Alpine gondola, because my passion for skiing eclipses my acrophobia. （I know what you’re thinking: My God, what a fascinating conundrum of a man is that Stanley Tucci. Whereas my wife is thinking, My God, how many neuroses can one man have? I wonder if there’s an app that can help him? Termagant.）
Over the next few days we sailed or motored around the coast, either dining on the yacht or stopping off to eat lunch or dinner in Capri or Positano, both of which I have been lucky enough to visit a number of times. One afternoon we headed southward along the coast for lunch at one of Felicity’s picks, a much-loved family-run restaurant named Lo Scoglio. Lo Scoglio translates as “the Rock” or “the Boulder,” but in Italian it refers only to large rocks or boulders by the shore, and the place is aptly named as it juts out of the shoreline and rests on a huge natural stone jetty.
The restaurant is accessible from land by car via the Amalfi Drive or perhaps more romantically by boat, as it is situated right on the beach and the dining area is suspended over the water with a small dock at the end. A portion of this covered dining area can be enclosed by sliding glass windows if the elements should attempt to disturb one’s meal, but otherwise it remains open to the sea breezes. It’s elegant but not fussy, with that breezy, relaxed air achieved so effortlessly by Italian and French seaside restaurants. The menu is very straightforward, offering frutti di mare, whole fresh fish of the day, pasta alle vongole, and much of the usual Mediterranean fare. But I noticed something that I had never seen before, a dish called spaghetti con zucchine alla Nerano. I inquired about it, and Antonia, one of the owners, who manages the restaurant, told me that it was a specialty of the restaurant and that area in general. She told me it was just zucchine, basil, oil, and grated cheese. Intrigued, I ordered it.
When the dish arrived I saw that it was exactly as described, spaghetti with sautéed small zucchine and basil. But upon tasting it I was unable to reconcile that besides the pasta there were only three other ingredients. I asked Antonia if there was any garlic or cream or parsley in the dish, and she said there wasn’t and left our table to actually do her job instead of being interrogated by an unnecessarily suspicious customer. But as I took another mouthful, again I thought that the flavors were too complex for the dish to be made with so few ingredients, and I began to doubt Antonia’s insistence that what she had told me was true. When she returned to the table, albeit more hesitantly this time, I asked basically the same questions I had asked her before, but this time around, in Italian. For some reason I thought I might get the truth out of her if she spoke her native language.
“Non c’e’ aglio?”
“No.”