“I just can’t do a lot of stairs.” My mother tells me this on our first afternoon in Puglia as we’re munching on eggplant-stuffed Panzerotti in Ostuni’s sprawling town square, the kick-off to what will be a two-week journey around Italy. Unfortunately for her, that fateful plea was the equivalent of trying to avoid sand in the Serengeti.

We eventually walked up and down, and up and down, so many countless unavoidable steps over the next 14 days it was almost as if the vacation Gods heard my poor mother and giggled as they multiplied them. I’m now certain that “Positano” itself translates to “land of lots of blisters.”