We flew into Rome on June 16th, after having spent the night on a wonderful Lufthansa flight from San Francisco. (How often does the plane trip count as a vacation plus?) Thanks to our lack of choice in airlines -- oops, I mean our loyalty to United -- we had built up enough miles to fly first class, which included roses in arm-rest bud vases, caviar with "traditional garnishes" (which we can now identify, thank you), and puffy comforters that don't really even deserve to be in the same category with the lightly-laundered slips of polyester that normally pass for airline blankets. On the 19th we rented a car and boldly drove about 50 miles into the country outside of Rome. We then boldly made a u-turn and went back to Rome to try again, and this time were able to successfully decipher the sign for the road to Naples. We stopped in Minturno on the way, the town from which Tom's great grandfather emigrated in the early 1900s.
On the 20th we went on to Pompeii and thence to Ravello on the Amalfi Coast, where we stayed one night before driving down to Spezzano Piccolo in Calabria. We left Southern Italy altogether on the 24th and took a ferry to Sicily, where we spent the night in Taormina. Sunday the 25th found us in Siracusa at the bottom tip of Sicily, and we drove to Caltagirone (source of much of Italy's hand-painted pottery) before heading up to Catania. On Tuesday morning the 27th we got back on a plane, and landed in SFO some 12 hours later. 
Here Tom is absorbing some last-minute snippets of Italian vocabulary -- "bathroom" and "reservation" came in handy; surprisingly "plumbing" and "government" were less so.
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