Last night, I dreamed I was in Nafplio.
In the dream, I was visiting the city in the middle of winter, yet it was warm enough for short sleeves. People were swimming in tranquil waters. Shop windows beckoned with jewelry, and I paused,not sure where to go. I was also aware that I was something of a shadow: a foreigner traveling alone. Nobody knew me; nobody would miss me if I vanished.
This isn’t hyperbole. I actually did have the dream. A few hours before I went to bed, I’d been sitting with Tony at our good friends’ Rani and Peter’s dining table. We’d talked about how I’d driven from Athens Airport to Nafplio, an old seaside town in the Peloponnese that has been called one of the most beautiful places in Greece. I very casually said I’d made the drive. I was downplaying what my dream later reminded me: that I had felt very alone.
I could have confessed that I’d been highly nervous about making the 170-kilometer drive by myself in a country where I’d only recently learned to decode the letters of the alphabet. Chiefly, I was worried about a breakdown, accident, or getting lost by myself. Would the Euro coins I had left over from Thessaloniki hold out for all the tolls I expected to pay on the 2-hour route?
It was my good fortune that the Greek highways were smooth as silk, although with my nerves I wound up taking 2 1/2 hours to get there. Apple maps were genius, even with unnamed roads. The worst part was at Athens Airport, when I sat down inside the tiny Kia automatic car I'd been allotted. I simply couldn't figure out how to start the engine. I sucked in my pride and 42 years of licensed driving experience and asked the Avis rental car employee to teach me the precise order of turning the car key and stepping on the accelerator--and no, it's not like in America. The other mystery he explained was the absence of P among the car's gears. Apparently, the way to put the car into a stationery mode was to put it in neutral and pull up the hand brake. Thank God I asked for assistance and didn't try to figure it out myself!
I reached Nafplio without any adversity; although it took me half an hour to find parking in the busy free lot at the port and drag my wheeled suitcase to my bed and breakfast, which was located in an old Venetian townhouse on a narrow no-parking street in the Old Town. One of the reasons I wanted to be in Nafplio was because of the extensive preserved old town, a mix of medieval and 19th century buildings that combine Ottoman and Venetian architecture. But that grandeur sometimes has parking restrictions.
Nafplio (also known as Nafplion) has ancient roots going back to the days of Poseidon, who's said to have fathered a son, Nauplios, who is the town's namesake. The port became a city of interest during medieval times, and was variously occupied by Greeks, Ottomans, Byzantines and Venetians.
The city has compact, yet impressive, neoclassical architecture and majestic forts and castles. All this and its good location for water trade led to its selection as the first free capital of modern Greece in 1828 (the capital’s location was changed to Athens in 1834). While a lot of Greece has suffered having old buildings lost to fires, earthquakes or modern development, historic preservation has been quite successful in Nafplio. Houses dating from the medieval period through the 1920s operate as charming small inns, restaurants, shops and museums. According to my millennial tour guide (who moved away briefly in his youth for the big lights), Nafplio has never had exciting nightlife, which means it appeals greatly to families and older tourists. The tourism is specifically driven by Greeks, many of whom drive from Athens on the weekend for a sightseeing and dining escape.
I’m a city dweller who unabashedly believes in the communal nature of urban places, and I am grateful to have an old house in an old neighborhood that includes a post office, library and a small supermarket. Still, the romantic in me has seen too many movies about small towns in Italy and France and England—and I have my own fantasies of the peaceful writing life in such a place, interspersed with jaunts to the market and conversations with longtime shop owners nearby. This you could have in Nafplio without question. Adding to the conviviality was that this city was not overrun with chain hotels. In the old town, most lodging appeared to be genuine pensiones—the historic Italian/French term given to hotels in Europe that tend toward being more boarding house or bed-and-breakfast. The kind of places with steep staircases, small rooms, and old furniture. And if you’re lucky—French doors that open onto a postage stamp balcony that show the historic neighborhood in its glory.
Hotel Adiani is operated by a local family who also run another pension-style hotel, Amymone, plus an elegant restaurant, Wild Duck, just across the way in a similar historic townhouse. The restaurant was full scale luxury: local produce and meat and cheese transformed into fusion dishes. My stay included breakfast that was prepared in the restaurant and also included specialty coffees made to order by a young man so versed in world news that upon hearing the name of my home city, he enquired about our tragedy, the 2024 Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse.
During the trip, it was humbling for me to witness how many people closely read the news of other countries. It also seemed that California was the state that people in the UK, France and Greece loved to imagine—and I'll take it as a compliment that people sometimes would incorrectly guess this was my home. Still, despite the allure of California, I only encountered one person—a server in an Edinburgh gastropub—who was hoping to travel to the U.S.. The uncertainty about the validity of tourist visas at US airports makes the reluctance quite understandable.
Some countries in Europe are working assertively to attract non-working foreigners with solid pensions and bank accounts to emigrate. Greece is one of the places offering Golden Visas—long term residencies—in exchange for buying and rehabilitating properties for their own use or commercial development. I saw plenty of for sale signs in Thessaloniki, and during my spring visit to Syros; however, very few of the former residences and offices in the historic area of Nafplio appeared to be vacant. Instead, I saw boutiques selling clothing, eyewear and jewelry; one gelato shop after another; and dozens of tavernas and cafes. Apparently, starting at Easter and through early October, the little town overflows with both Greek and foreign visitors. I had arrived during the last bustling weekend, when car parking was tight at the port; but once Monday came, I found I was often the only person roaming a particular block. A photographer's dream!
When you are alone, you can make your days as complicated or simple as you like. I set up a pleasant routine of having a superb breakfast downstairs, followed by a walk to get another coffee at a shop to take up to my room. Hotel Adiani had renovated its old rooms handsomely including with modern art painting on headboards and walls, and interesting textiles here and there. It was a glorious surprise to have a wooden writing desk with a good chair, as well as a small sofa. With such comfortable digs, I wrote more than I expected. I went out for lunch every day and often found the appetizer of meze or a salad was quite large and so filling that I couldn’t manage a regular entrée as well. I walked the food off in the afternoons by exploring the town’s famous landmarks like the hilltop Palamidi castle, approximately 900 steps above the town; the genteel Syntagma Square, and Arvinitia Beach, a sweet, semi-circular protected swimming place that was in use by a handful of visitors in early November. I had looked at the calendar and not believed it would be possible to swim in November. Therefore, I had no bathing suit, so I can’t say what the temperatures were, but my guess is the water wasn’t as warm as the sunshine.
When nighttime fell, I was often in my room, looking out from the balcony at the sunset and the street life below. Usually I was too full from my lunch to want much, but I once ate by candelight at an outdoor table overlooking the port at Wild Duck. Another time I wandered into a bakery and picked out a small box of cookies to have with a hot cup of herb tea (it seemed like bakery browsing was very popular in the evening throughout Greece). I have to make a recommendation about Nafplio's oranges and tangerines. They had varying levels of sweetness and were delicious in salads, juice, or eaten as themselves.
Dinnertime is when I most often missed being with Tony, who was 5000 miles away conducting a midday Zoom with his colleagues. It wasn't that I couldn't eat alone. All restaurants I visited welcomed me as a solo diner, some with quite kind and attentive service. To the Greeks, a solitary traveler is unusual; two of my walking tour guides in Thessaloniki and Nafplio confessed that they hadn’t ever traveled alone and weren’t sure that they would like it.
I’ve traveled alone for many years; first as a journalist, and then as a young woman in Japan whose husband was oceans away on a navy ship.After we were reunited, I kept traveling alone for the sake of research for my novels. Therefore, this new step—spending half my fall trip in Europe alone, going exactly where I wanted, and eating only when I was hungry—didn’t seem on the outset to be that difficult. It with the widespread English spoken by younger Greeks, being understood was mostly possible. It was only when I reached France—the final week of the five-week journey—that my solo journey became a little more challenging.
More on that later!
