Salerno — Expectations are little bastards.

Expectations are like movie trailers.

If they’re too good, the movie can’t possibly live up to them. And if they’re bad—if the trailer is boring, if it looks like some Sunday-afternoon TV filler—you end up surprised. You laugh more, cry more, live more.

Take Salerno, for instance.

I wasn’t expecting anything from Salerno. I swear.
Not because people warned me about it—but because no one mentioned it at all. It was like that cousin who lives way down south and only shows up at the big weddings. I pictured a grey city, half-crumbled, with damp stains on the walls and the smell of old fish. One of those places where the buildings are tired, and the people even more so.

Like a version of Naples, but without the branding.

I was already mentally prepared to just put up with it. But of course, because the expectations were so low, Salerno showed up huge.

It’s not spectacular. It’s modest, really.
But that kind of modesty—when you show up expecting nothing—turns into a miracle.
The first jolt was the smell of clean laundry in the street. Not someone’s perfume—the sheets. That smell that floats down from balconies, mixed with sunshine, like someone airing out their childhood.

Then came the ceramic alleyways.
Not a single corner without mosaics, without some texture catching the light like candy. This was in Vietri sul Mare, a little village so close to Salerno you can walk there. That’s what we did—on foot, not expecting much, and suddenly we were inside a porcelain cabinet.

The stairs are made of ceramic, the benches in the square are ceramic, even the open-air theaters are ceramic. It’s like someone took the memory of a Sunday lunch table and spread it across the whole village.

And the people…The people don’t rush.

There’s no urgency to sell you anything. They greet you without checking your sneakers. No one scrolls you with their eyes. Here, the KPI is who enjoys their aperitivo best—not who sells the most.

That’s what expectations do:
If you expect cold, any warmth melts you. And Salerno is warm like a village, even with its giant IKEA and its busy port. The boats go past the window all day long, back and forth to Naples like it’s nothing. Nothing here is urgent. Not even commerce.

People smoke—outside the bar, in the line at the supermarket, on the curb. The Italian sounds like it’s in a hurry to go grab a drink. And still, everything flows.

Cars drive like these narrow alleys were highways. And in their twisted logic, they are. There’s life. There are markets. There are stairs named after poets. There’s Sunday superstition and wood-fired ovens that never go out.

And yeah—Salerno still is what I thought it would be.
Old, a little ugly, kind of broken.
But now I say that with affection.
Because ugly—when it doesn’t try to hide—ends up being beautiful.

Salerno reminded me of something I already knew but like to be told again: expectations are little bastards.

The last thing I scribbled down before sitting to write this whole thing stuck with me like an accidental epilogue: Tango wasn’t invented in Italy by chance.

Because there’s something here.
Something like elegant sadness.
A passion with no marketing plan.
A broken beauty that doesn’t want to be fixed.

And you—when you expect nothing—end up writing things like this.