Alas, the end of the week arrived. Time to leave our “home” overlooking the sea at Massa Lubrense … and venture into the great unknown.

Well, we know the broad outline of the great unknown: Sicily. A long drive and ferry ride south.

So, we each took a last, longing look out over the sea, glistening under the morning sun, and at the isles of Capri and Ischia, and Naples across the bay … kissed our landlord, Lorenzo, goodbye (quite literally; this is Italy), had a quick look at the place that sleeps two in the tiny but equally well-sited apartment above ours (you know, just in case …) and squeezed into the Fiat.

And off we went.

It was Saturday morning, and all of Italy — on the Sorrento Peninsula, anyway — seemed to be on the move. Locals on scooters and actual motorcycles and ancient Fiats battered by years of squeezing through the region’s narrow streets; tourists in lumbering buses, coming into town or up from a cruise ship in the harbor; or the five of us, at the moment, rolling around the corners and into the traffic mess that was Sorrento.

(I have mentioned, yes, how profoundly lucky we were to end up in Massa Lubrense? Charming village, wonderful digs, just past the point on the peninsula where 95 percent of tourists stop short. We thought we were going to be in Sorrento, but we were about three  miles past it and quickly realized Sorrento would not have been remotely as peaceful or private or scenic. Couldn’t have been. Great good fortune.)

We dropped off Liz at the train station. She was headed via rail to Naples and then to a five-hour ferry ride with a friend to the island of Panarea near Sicily. Ciao-ciao, Liz!

Then back into the snaking line of traffic off the peninsula and down to the A3. This time heading toward Salerno … because we wanted to, not because of accidents. (See earlier entries.)

We had approximately 550 kilometers (about 330 miles) to drive to reach San Giovanni, which is just short of Reggio, the toe of the Italian boot — and where we would catch a ferry to Messina, on the northeast corner of Sicily.

From what I can tell, Italy south of Naples is often celebrated but rarely visited. Which is one of the reasons I was interested in driving through it, rather than trying to catch a plane from Naples to Sicily. Or a ferry.

Between Naples and Reggio, big cities are nonexistent. Attractions little-known. The distances surprisingly great, given that it is Europe. (Italy is all north-south and very little east-west.) The south is generally known for dry, barren land and lots of poverty in regions such as Basilicata, Apulia and Calabria.

What we found, as we flogged the Fiat south and a bit east … was hills and mountains … and mountains and hills. The A3, the Interstate 10 of Italy, often was reduced to one lane in each direction as construction or repair went on on the other side. We frequently dove into tunnels, cramped and poorly lit, rather than fight our way over the hills and ridges that lay across our path.

It became much easier to understand why Italy was so late in unifying: Almost no roads connect north with south, and intercourse between communities must have been unusual, expensive and almost exclusively seaborne for centuries.

We didn’t see “dry” as much as “hilly” during our drive. And occasionally mountainous, peaks that seemed to have recently been thrust up from the sea bed, craggy and bare. Useless for agriculture.

A typical 10 minutes: A drive at 80 kilometers per hour on a four-lane road reduced to two, a little town built into the hills on our left with some cultivated land below the town. Then a tunnel for a half-mile or so … and a new village built into the next hill on our left, with a few acres of tillage below it and another tunnel looming ahead.

I can remember an Italian acquaintance telling me, 20 years ago, that Albanian refugees in Italy were a bad idea because “the boat is full.” Meaning Italy had nowhere to put more people.

If you live in Rome or Florence I can see how you might feel that way. But hurtling through Calabria, you are struck by how lightly populated the region is, how empty the area seems once you get a few miles from the coast. Not that the land would support a population because of a lack of agriculture. Or industry. Or infrastructure. But the boat is not full.

We stopped at a place called Rende (just north of the “big city” of Cosenza, population 260,000) for lunch. We were thinking “pizza” but pizza is considered supper fare, at least in this part of Italy, and was not available at the pizzeria we stopped at. Instead, we had an antipasto of buffalo mozzarella and prosciutto, and tagliatelle with porcini mushrooms … and had no complaints.

As I feared, pasta at 1:30 left me a bit loggy, and at the next servizio area off the highway, I paid euro 1.50 for a Coke to keep me awake, which seemed only prudent. Because I was driving.

Had the road been straight, or actually four lanes, we might have covered the 330 miles in four hours or so. Instead, the construction and frequent sharp bends in the road kept speeds down to about 60 mph, at best.

Thus, it wasn’t until after 5 p.m. that we pulled into San Giovanni and took the exit down to the wharves. We got tickets for the 5:30 ferry across to Messina, which seemed so close we could almost swim there. At 5:20, we were allowed to drive onto the ferry; cars took one lane and semi-trailers another. We got out of the car, happy at the chance to stretch our legs if not breath fresh air, because on a ferry, in a harbor, the air is anything but fresh.

The last major load onto the ferry was a string of about a half-dozen railroad cars. Most of the them freight cars but at least one passenger. They were pushed, slowly, into the bowels of the ship by an orange-painted engine. Only when that big load was aboard did the pointed prow of the ferry — which is raised upon landing — return to its seaworthy position.

Our time at sea was barely 25 minutes, and would have been less if the ferry hadn’t turned around, a few hundred yards out of port. The wind came up once we were in open water, as it usually does, and for a few minutes we were almost cold, even with the sun still shining brightly. Messina hove into view, packed densely from the water up to the hills, and its port was busy and crowded.

We drove off the boat and into the streets of Messina, and we immediately noticed a difference in energy level. From sleepy Calabria to noisy, frantic Sicily. Or Messina, anyway. The drive through town to the autostrade reminded me of the madness of driving in Rome, which I last did in 1990. Where “lanes” are more imagination than reality, and street lights are more suggestion than demand.

Messina is busy, if nothing else.

Then we had a last 50-kilometer (30-mile) dash down the east coast of the island to the town of Fiumefreddo, about halfway between Messina and Catania, two of the three most important cities on the island — which is the biggest in the Mediterranean.

We found the offramp for Fiumefreddo, which translates as “cold water;” the nearby river is surprisingly cold because it is fed by the melting snows of Mount Etna, Europe’s largest active volcano.

Even in the gathering gloom, we could see the massive shoulders of the mountain, which rises nearly 11,000 feet above sea level. This whole area lies in the shadow of the mountain, leading to early sunsets as the sun disappears behind Etna.

We did the usual double-take of “hey, that’s snow on the top of that mountain!” before getting down to the business of finding our agritourismo hotel, Aziendo Feudogrande. We had detailed instructions from the Italian mainland right up to the offramp from the autostrade … and then they stopped.

We got to what seemed like the middle of town, dark and narrow and run down … and called the hotel asking for directions … and could find no one there who spoke even a bit of English. Leah broke out her Spanish-inflected Italian, and found she could hardly understand a word of the local dialect, but she did pick up one street name “Maccarone” (like macaroni) … and we headed off in what seemed a ridiculous search for this one street in a town where street signs seemed almost nonexistent.

Just as I was getting ready to pull a U-turn and head back to the city center, Leah spotted a plaque on a building with the name “Maccarone” … and bang, we had blundered into another home stretch.

Up the road we went, climbing up the foot of the mountain, away from the sea … looking for the “black 84” address. And finding it.

It was 7:30. We had been on the road for almost 10 hours. We were ready for a warm welcome and a nice meal. It was not to be.

The reception area was dark and locked up. We poked our heads into what we thought was the restaurant … but not a soul in sight. We went around back … an open door to more dining rooms, but no one there, either. We walked a bit more and found some people, in the kitchen. Again, no English … but after giving our names several times, one woman seemed to agree we had reservations and took us to two nice, big rooms upstairs,  above the restaurant … opened the doors, and left. We were in the rooms but had no keys.

We were told that dinner was being served, like, now. As I pulled the Fiat up close to offload the luggage, one of the waiters, a burly guy with a brusque manner, made clear that I needed to move the Fiat pronto, and he also told me that dinner was at “otto” or 8. Which was in a matter of minutes.

Our complete confusion over what was going on, whether we had actually checked in, where dinner would be served, how much it would cost, what wine choices we could make … none of that was answered in the next hour.

We were shown to a table near the kitchen, and the gruff waiter brought out enormous antipasto plates. One plate could have served all of us.  A rice ball, mashed potatoes with ham, deep-fried zucchini flower, a slice of ham, a salami, a mozzarella ball … just a batch of stuff. A meal in itself. We managed to get across the idea we would like a bottle of red and some mineral water with fizz, and those appeared almost immediately. As did our second course, rigatoni pasta with a light red sauce.

Still, no one had spoken to us, and by now we are eavesdropping on the conversations of the half-dozen other people in the room, seeing if they were speaking a language one of us could communicate in — English, French, Spanish, even German.

Eventually, I decided to ambush a husband and wife at their table. We had decided they were Brits, just by the look of them. They were Germans, but it didn’t matter, because I walked right past them (they were in the middle of a sentence) and saw one of the half-dozen bustling employees coming at me from an office … and found the one guy who speaks some English.

He was apologetic for the way we had not been welcomed, opened the reception area, got us keys, gave me a cable for a broadband internet hookup in the rooms … and that was enough for the moment. Grazie mille.

Our third course was a bit of pot roast with potatoes. The meat was thin, which was good, because we had been stuffed since the antipasto. Dessert was a small glass of lemon granita, which was new to me and quite refreshing. The rest of the meal was fine, but nothing special. Not at all. We were underwhelmed; food is supposed to be the raison d’etre of agriturismo, and our service had been perfunctory and the food remarkable only by its volume. There was talk of leaving the hotel at the soonest available moment and maybe changing towns, as well. Or even going back to the mainland.

But first we would sleep on it.

As we were eating, two enormous groups of local residents came in. One a table of 25, the other about 30. So we ascribed the brusque service and rushed appearances of waves of food as the staff trying to get us out of the way before the hordes descended.

Still, not the reception you expect at a four-star hotel.

As we climbed the steps to our rooms, we were thinking of Massa Lubrense. Wouldn’t we rather be there? Eating at the Primavera ristorante, or making our own dinner?

We had left Paradise, and had battled our way down to Sicily, which seemed anything but warm, aside from temperature.  We wondered what we had gotten into.