Spring Break Part 2: Naples and Pompeii

I instantly love Naples. Wild, raucous, noisy, dirty, balls-out Naples. An anthill inside a rabbit warren, with all the exoticism of a Middle Eastern bazaar and a touch of New Orleans voodoo. A tripped-out, dangerous and cheerful nuthouse. My friend Wade came to Naples in the 1970s and was mugged . . . In a museum. The city is all decorated with the laundry that hangs from every window and dangles across every street; everybody's fresh-washed undershirts and brassieres flapping in the wind like Tibetan prayer flags. There is not a street in Naples in which some tough little kid in shorts and mismatched socks is not screaming up from the sidewalk to some other tough little kid on a rooftop nearby. Nor is there a building in this town that doesn't have at least one crooked old woman seated at her window, peering suspiciously down at the activity below. The people here are so insanely psyched to be from Naples, and why shouldn't they be? This is a city that gave the world pizza and ice cream. The Neapolitan women in particular are such a gang of tough-voiced, loud-mouthed, generous, nosy dames, all bossy and annoyed and right up in your face and just trying to friggin' help you for chrissake, you dope--why they gotta do everything around here? The accent in Naples is like a friendly cuff on the ear. It's like walking through a city of short-order cooks, everybody hollering at the same time. They still have their own dialect here, and an ever-changing liquid dictionary of local slang, but somehow I find that the Neapolitans are the easiest people for me to understand in Italy. Why? Because they want you to understand, damn it. They talk loud and emphatically, and if you can't understand what they're actually saying out of their mouths, you can usually pick up the inference from the gesture.

-Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love

Day three of Spring Break, Meghan, Hannah, and I took a train from Rome to Naples. When we arrived, it was like a completely different world. Naples is big. It's dirty. It's scary.

But if you come to Italy for the whole experience, you'd better go to Naples.

We stayed at a hostel called Giovanni's Home. Giovanni is really cool. He's this old man who smokes a lot of cigarettes and loves Naples and really truly cares about the people staying at his hostel. He called me when we hadn't arrived for our 1:00 check-in time to make sure we were coming and weren't lost. When we finally made it, he welcomed us inside and had us put down our things. He brought us cups of water, and then we sat as he told us of about a million things we could do in Naples.

Giovanni LOVES Naples. He wants everyone to love Naples. He is sad because everyone comes to Naples as a jumping-off point to Sorrento and the Almafi Coast. ("You can see beaches anywhere!") He is upset that the guidebooks leave out so many of the things there are to do in Naples.

He explained the history of his beloved city. Then he went off about how everyone thinks Naples is such a horrible place; people think it's dangerous because of the mafia, thieves, crime, etc. He showed us videos of pickpockets so we knew how they operate and how to avoid being ripped off. He gave us advice to not wear our purses out, what neighborhoods to avoid, and so on. He told us we should come home by 10 or 10:30pm latest; if we came back drunk, we weren't allowed to sleep there. (That wasn't really an issue for us, but it was nice to know that other people wouldn't be coming back drunk, as this was our first experience in a "dorm style shared room" hostel.)

Giovanni's Home is the best hostel in Naples. (Just ask Hostelworld.com; it's Top-Rated.) We had an 8-bed female dorm room that didn't lock, in a city considered very dangerous, and I felt totally safe leaving all my stuff out in the room when we were gone. (Meghan accidentally left €20 on her bed once when we left. When we got back, Giovanni said he had put it under her pillow for her. He makes sure your things don't get messed with. He's awesome.)

By the time Giovanni finished his Naples speech and fed us bowls of delicious pasta, it was already getting dark outside. We (Meghan, Hannah, and I, plus a random guy named Jeff who was staying at Giovanni's) headed out for a walk through town, following a route Giovanni had marked on a map he gave us, down to the water.

Side note: You must know that walking around Naples, especially in the dark, is terrifying only for this reason. Stoplights are discretionary. Not every street has street lamps. And I'm 99% positive there's some sort of game amongst the motorcyclists called Try To Hit The Unsuspecting Pedestrian. Also, a good portion of the streets we had to walk on were sidewalkless, with cars haphazardly parked right up against both sides, and trash spilling into the road. I don't know if my heart could have taken more than two days of this terror. I almost died every time a cyclist came out of nowhere and whizzed past us, evil grin on his face as we shrieked in fear.

But anyway, we had to walk back up through town to get pizza, and nothing was going to keep us from that.

In Eat Pray Love, she goes to a place called Pizzeria da Michele. We wanted to go the first night, but it's closed on Sundays. So instead, we went to their rival across the street, Pizzeria Trianon. It has more choices than Pizzeria da Michelle (which has only two kinds to choose from), but since I wanted to do a true comparison, I ordered margherita pizza (with tomato sauce and mozzarella) at both places.

Hannah and Me with our Pizzas

I tried to remember everything about this pizza, because I really wanted to figure out the difference between this one and the one we would have the next day. This was delicious. The edges were slightly burned. The crust was chewy. The sauce was flavorful. It was everything I had hoped for in a Naples pizza. And it was a wonderful ending to yet another wonderful day.

Monday morning, the four of us (Jeff began the day with us, but we ended up losing him before we went to Pompeii; he got lost when he went to get food and then we couldn't find him; that's another story for another day.) took the metro down to a stop near the water. Giovanni said we wouldn't have time to walk there if we wanted to fit in everything we had planned for that day.

We got off the metro and the water was beautiful. The sun was shining (as usual on this trip) and it was warm and breezy. The boats were lined up along the dock. The water was clear and blue.

Naples, Along the Coast

Once we had walked along the coast past a big castle (We didn't have time to explore it), we headed up a main street. We went to a bar Giovanni told us to go to, and we ordered some kind of coffee he told us to order. It was an espresso, but with lots of sugar and chocolate in it. It was just what we needed to wake up! Well. . . that and a sfogliatelle. What's a sfogliatelle?

After taking a bite, I remembered I needed to photograph it!

Sfogliatella is a "crispy scallop shell shaped pastry filled with sweetened ricotta cheese" (Rick Steves). It tasted like creamy cake inside a crispy croissant.

Then we went to Cappella Sansevero, a chapel where you can see the Veiled Christ. This may be the most incredible thing I have seen. Ever.

Veiled Christ, by Giuseppe Sanmartino, 1753

And possibly the second most incredible thing I have seen. Ever.

Disillusion

So, I think my favorite sculptures I've seen were at a chapel in Naples, not a museum in Rome. These were really, really amazing.

Next on the agenda for the day was Napoli Sotterranea, an archaeological site. It's an underground maze of passageways and ruins from Greek and Roman times. It's a guided tour. We went down 121 steps under the city and explored an old theater, ancient water channels and an aqueduct, and even a place where people stayed underground during WWII to avoid being hit by bombs. We had to squeeze through narrow tunnels and we carried candles for light, which made it feel kind of spooky. This wasn't part of our original Naples plan, but thanks to Giovanni, we went, and it was a very cool (I don't mean temperature, though it was a bit chilly) experience.

We spent all afternoon in Pompeii. Pompeii is a city that was destroyed and completely buried (under 4 to 6 meters of ash) when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79AD. It was rediscovered in 1599. It has been excavated since 1748.

Going to Pompeii and exploring the city gives you a really weird feeling. The roads are still there. Most of the walls are still standing. You can see ancient paintings and mosaics, ovens used thousands of years ago. I couldn't pick just a couple of pictures, so here are several that give an idea of what it's like.

Walls Still Standing

I think this was part of the Forum.

When Vesuvius erupted, 2000 citizens suffocated under the ash. Their bodies were buried. Excavating Pompeii, archaeologists detected empty spaces in the debris. They filled the holes with plaster to create molds of the Pompeiians:


One of the Plaster Casts of a Victim



Frescoes on the Walls

Original Lead Pipes; Part of the Water System

A Brick Oven

The grooves in the street are from chariots.

Ampitheater

Pompeii wore us out.

It was time to head back to Rome.

Is it okay if Pizzeria da Michele was the thing I looked forward to most on this trip? Is it okay that I was a little obsessed, and would refuse to leave Italy without going? Seriously. I remember talking (dreaming) about getting pizza here months ago (after reading EPL), when Italy seemed so far away. The moment finally came!

Here's why I was so obsessed with the notion. (Bear with me.) It's another quote from Eat Pray Love:

Pizzeria da Michele is a small place with only two rooms and one nonstop oven. . . There's not a menu. They have only two varieties of pizza here--regular and extra cheese. None of this new age southern California olives-and-sun-dried-tomato wannabe pizza twaddle. The dough, it takes me half my meal to figure out, tastes more like Indian nan than like any pizza dough I ever tried. It's soft and chewy and yielding, but incredibly thin. I always thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust--thin and crispy, or thick and doughy. How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise. On top, there is a sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts the fresh buffalo mozzarella, and the one sprig of basil in the middle of the whole deal somehow infuses the entire pizza with herbal radiance, much the same way one shimmering movie star in the middle of a party brings a contact high of glamour to everyone around her. It's technically impossible to eat this thing, of course. You try to take a bite off your slice and the gummy crust folds, and the hot cheese runs away like topsoil in a landslide, makes a mess of you and your surroundings, but just deal with it. . .the pizza is so good we can barely cope.

That description is perfect.

Do you see the light in my eyes?
This is a magical pizza.

Yes. The whole thing was eaten by Yours Truly.

It was the greatest thing I have ever done.

Thank you, Naples.