Sunbathing customs at fine hotels like Caravelle http://bit.ly/1biVCSe on the Italian Riviera are built around food and drink: continental breakfasts lashing spokes of fresh fruit and fiber cereal, juices of myriad variety, yogurt from 7:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. and then the sunbathing begins on fine days to lunch time at 12:30 p.m. or 1 p.m. when it’s antipasti, fruits of the sea, calamari, pulpo and asparagus (not white) and shrimp, whatever green vegetable is in season, a spinach pie made by the mother/owner of the hotel who works the tables as only a proud woman who sees to everything can do, the overfed seagull she feeds also part of her lunchtime routine … the big fellow called Chee-Chee, named for his hungry cry … (the proprietress also makes the lemon and orange rind marmalade that we spoon liberally over the farm fresh yogurt for breakfast) all the antipasti drizzled to poured with olive oil, a centuries-old recipe from the family’s groves in the terraced mountains . . . if you run like I do up the hills, you are alone on the switchbacks going higher and higher the stone walls separating the trees, the walls regularly rebuilt, kept strong enough to sustain the farming but still looking like they would have, say, one hundred or three hundred years ago, close your eyes and that is what you feel, it is from terraced farms like these that the oil is made, why tales of the gods are best read here, all is the fruit of the land, the sea and it is not even two o’clock, a grilled fish is available but that will be for later, rather we chose a primi: pasta with pesto and potatoes, the noodles more al dente that an American chef would allow so that each bite is replete with texture, complemented with the DOC rose wine, not a type of wine I normally enjoy but this one, so light on the berry and crisp that there is no better choice and finish with a short, strong coffee … Any other place it’s siesta, but the meal energizes not stupefies and at 3 p.m., with still seven hours of sun to come, return to the Mediterranean beach, so many lounge chairs with head-vent shades and each pair its own sun umbrella, a tiny shelf to hold your bottles of cream, tanning oil and Chapstick …
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