Meanwhile in Italy, in the coastal town of Ravello where he had met and courted Jetta in 1923 was a favorite summer vacation site for the family, and they returned there several times while they lived in Rome. Nearby Amalfi was an important port in Italy during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, and the churches and many buildings on the Amalfi coast reflect the influence of the Moors (Arabs) whose presence, stretched over three centuries, is still strongly felt in southern Italy and Sicily.

The trip, which lasted two months, began on April 26.Throughout the journey, in which they voyaged in three different vessels, there were frequent stops in Mediterranean ports. Escher and Jetta would disembark to visit the towns and often travel by bus or train to an inland village.Escher filled his sketchbooks with studies that he would later use for the promised prints. 

This journey was both a return to places visited in Escher's student days and an exploration of new places. It also marked the onset of an important turn in his own artistic journey. While he sketched scenes of Mediterranean harbors and villages with practiced eye and hand, when he returned to the Alhambra on May 23, he was a student all over again He was stirred anew by the colorful geometric patterns of the Moorish  Majolica tiles , the decorative tracery in the stucco and stone work  and wanted to record a much as possible in the short stay of three days. 

His travel diary for that day notes, "This morning to the Alhambra. I thoroughly enjoyed this delightful aristocratic work of art. In the afternoon back there again, and started copying majolica motifs. What a contrast: the quiet, elevated princely palaces up there and the dirty, neglected, decaying city below There are hardly any foreigners. We're being gaped at like creature from another planet, and that in a town that used to be a center of tourism!"