After the first of what would become my morning meditation ritual on the balcony surveying my new territory, I reluctantly pulled myself away to prepare for the adventures of our first full day of Cilento Exploring.

I was actually poking around a bit and holding things up. I sometimes love the particular “spot” I am in at the time, or “view” I am taking in and become slightly reluctant to “move on”. Please don’t mistake this as an inability to change on my part, because I will decide to change the largest things in my life, like where I live, spontaneously. It’s the small moments, the “snapshots” of life where I pause for reflection. This may be the only trait that somewhat grounds me. I consider myself a “citizen of the world”. Home is where I am at any given moment. . .

So, the shower . . . a small moment in the shower . . .well, this would fit my definition of “camping out”. I knew as I stepped in it would be interesting. You see, I had a great shower, but although I were able to arrange remotely for a kitchen to be installed on the blank wall with pipes, we had not managed to handle the Shower Situation.

Esattamente. No shower surround. Well, I smiled to myself, the bathroom will always be clean, because it will also get washed in its entirety each day during my shower!

So, a few minutes and a shower-shined bathroom later, I was on to grab some colazione (breakfast) as I planned the days’ events. I drove a couple of kilometers down to Marina di Casalvelino, where I became part of the view from our balcony to join the local crowd at Isola Verde, a cool beachfront bar, for a pastry and cafè. I enjoyed everything about it so much, that this, too, would become a ritual.

I decided that Casalnuovo Cilento, the very old hilltop town to which I was now technically a local citizen (cittidini) of, should appropriately be our first visit. Set high on the hill on the side of Villa D’Amore that is away from the ocean we wove our way up and down the winding road to Casalnuovo Cilento.

Once on the ancient castle grounds, I spotted our next destination. Out the back, across the valley very high on a hill I saw a small town. Once I captured the magnificent view of it, I used my iPhone to map a route to it and learned it was called Salento. This would be my post-pranzo (after lunch) adventure!