I’ve been away on holiday.

It was only for a week and therefore doesn’t entirely excuse the long gap between posts on here.

Although it did involve a lot of preparation, because we went somewhere new – Italy – and we also met up there with my Australian niece, which involved lots of complicated arrangements, given that she was travelling from Spain and we were travelling from England, and none of us had ever been to Italy before.

Not to mention all the usual washing, packing, cleaning, finding things (European adaptors? Mozzie repellent?) you haven’t needed since last holiday; leaving the house tidy (because I can’t stand coming home to a messy house); emptying the fridge of anything likely to go off; moving all the houseplants to the kitchen so that the neighbours can water them easily; and all that other “stuff” to be done before you go on holiday. That all took a while.

And the night we returned was the night of lad’s prom (he has just finished his exams and starts sixth form in September), so there was a fair bit of pre-holiday time taken up shopping for a tie, shirt and smart suit for a skinny non-suit-wearing lad not yet quite tall or broad enough to wear an actual man’s suit.

And I did the Secret Garden Craft Fair the weekend before we went away, so up until then I was also busy planning and making and packing for my stall, and then unpacking and putting it all away afterwards.

It was all worth it, because the fair was a success – and I actually felt really happy with how my stall looked for possibly the first time ever…Anyway, we are back home now and I have decided that going away for a week instead of a fortnight is actually bloody brilliant. Because it all felt like a whirlwind of gorgeousness, with no time to get bored or fed up with anything or one another; just lots of wonderful new sights and experiences. Not to mention the utter joy of seeing my niece again, after she has been off on her travels for a year.

So where did we go and what did we do? Well, we flew to Naples and stayed up in the mountains (Monte Faito, to be exact) located inland from the Amalfi Coast (which is sort of on the “shin” of the boot-shape of Italy), taking in Amalfi, Sorrento, Ravello, Positano, Vico Equense, and Pompeii.

The scenery was stunning, especially via the cable car down the mountain. The food – especially fruit, pizza and pasta – was delicious. The architecture was beautiful. The hospitality was lovely. The heat was… just about bearable. Driving in Italy was… a bit hair-raising.

But this isn’t a travel blog, and you’re probably not really that interested in a massively long post talking about all the details of what we did and where we went. So I won’t bore you with all that. (If anyone does want to know where we stayed or anything else about where we went, drop me a comment or message and I’ll do my best to answer).

What I really wanted to show you in this post were a couple of my own, personal, holiday highlights.

The house we stayed in, we guessed, was probably built for folk from the area around the coast to escape to during the heat of summer, to enjoy the cooler air and shady forest walks up on the mountain. As with many holiday homes, the furnishings looked like they belonged to another time, one located somewhere between the 1960s and the 1980s – but not in any ironic or fashionable way. The contents probably migrated to the house as they were replaced at home, to live out their days in semi-retirement, in the company of tourists.

There was a lot of dark shiny wood, doilies, fake flowers, and paintings with that vintage “paint by numbers” style about them…

Amongst these were a few original paintings by an unknown artist whose work I loved…I’m guessing they were painted in the 1960s or 1970s. I love that they are on offcuts of hardboard. I love the colours and the style.

If I were the light-fingered type and had brought a larger suitcase, it might have been tempting to bring one home with me.

The other exciting and intriguing thing was a little shop in one of the villages we drove through every time we went down the mountain…Well, I say shop. It had no signs. It had no staff. It was unclear whether it was actually open.

In fact, the only thing that identified it as a shop at all was that when I leaned in past the stepladder blocking the entrance, peeped inside and picked up one of the items near the door, it had a price on it.

There were dusty, faded Christmas decorations that looked like they’d been in stock for decades. There were religious icons. But what really got my attention was that inside, it was stuffed to the gills with miniature things…

There were figures: religious, workaday, folkloric and just generally odd.There was tiny furniture: chests of drawers and tables with gingham tablecloths, laden with plates of food and jugs of wine…There were miniature strings of garlic and hams hanging up; fruit and vegetables in crates; tiny stalls stacked with goods, complete with their vendors…There were men holding pigs, and musical instruments; women holding babies, and cabbages, or lying down, or waving their arms in the air, or balancing things on their heads. There were cows and donkeys and chickens.

There were teeny tiny birdcages with even teenier tinier birds inside…It was quite the most interesting shop I have ever seen.

But being a shy, non-Italian-speaking English person, I couldn’t quite summon up the courage to go into the next-door shop and ask if it was possible to buy something.

And actually, I’m not even sure I really wanted to. I had the vague notion that to remove one little bit of this magical menagerie might make it seem, back home, somewhat diminished, so far away from it’s myriad companions.

So I just leaned in and took photos.

To help me remember – and share – one of my favourite holiday highlights. ♥