Along the Amalfi Coast - Salerno, Italy

When we started traveling to Europe, one of the places I was excited to visit was Italy. My mother was from a large Italian family and her parents immigrated to the US before she was born. Growing up, I used to love when my mother's family got together. There was always great food, lots of laughter and good times. The only annoying thing was when the adults wanted to talk about something privately, they would start talking in Italian. It was an atmosphere that I now miss very much.

The next best thing was to visit the home country. While we have barely scratched the surface on our travels there, the Amalfi Coast is one of our favorite places. Located on the western coast of Italy, the Amalfi Coast stretches about 30 miles with sheer cliffs and narrow roads to navigate. Perhaps the better way to see the coast is to take a boat ride and see it from the water. There you get a better sense of the mountains dropping down to the water and and the many little fishing villages that dot the coast. We had taken a boat out of Salerno (my mother's family's surname) and I believe this photo depicts the town of Amalfi.