Author's note: First trip overseas in four years due to the COVID-19 pandemic and I forgot to take a notebook to journal my impressions in. Jotted a few notes and figured I would just blog it electronically upon my return.
Lisa and I arrived in Naples late yesterday afternoon. We flew out of Dulles in Northern Virginia and had a long layover in Paris, pushing our arrival back to late in the day yesterday. Naples was complete chaos. Riding in the cab to our hotel, there did not appear to be any traffic laws (and very few traffic signals) whatsoever. The streets had no lanes and our driver frequently pulled over to the far left to pass in the face of oncoming traffic! In our two days in Naples, we only found one pedestrian crosswalk that had a signal, the rest were a bit of a free for all. Naples is old; in a rundown sort of way, not in the preserved historical way of Rome or Florence; and dirty. Other than an immaculate and modern train station, there was trash everywhere. Our hotel (B and B Hotel Napoli) was right on the Piazza Garibaldi, a large concrete covered public space that was active with people all hours of the day and night and smelled of urine. However, the location served our purposes as it was right near the train station and the hotel itself was nice enough. Clean and the staff were pleasant. Bathroom, and particularly the shower, were a bit claustrophobic, but sometimes that is par for the course in Europe. Breakfast wasn't included in our booking, but it wasn't very expensive and it was serviceable. The hotel did have a pretty cool roof top deck that afforded good views of the city. Naples was also HOT. Temperatures in the mid-90's (Fahrenheit) with head indices in the 100's. It was pleasant enough in the evening when we checked in to our hotel, but during the day it was brutal.
Last night, we had dinner at a 100-year-old pizzeria called Trianon. What else were we going to eat in
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| Pizza and Lacryma Christi Rosso |
Naples, besides pizza? It was invented there. Trianon is right across the street from a more famous pizzeria called L'Antica Pizzeria da Michele, which has apparently become quite a tourist destination since Julia Roberts filmed a scene from, Eat, Pray Love, there. Many online reviewers (and Rick Steves, apparently) describe Trianon as just as good and with less wait. Both were about a 15 minute walk from the hotel and, sure enough, people were lined up outside L'Antica Pizzeria da Michele and we walked right into Trianon and sat down. The pizza did not disappoint. Even in the United States, Neapolitan style pizza is my favourite - thin in the center, thick but airy around the edges, simple sauce of crushed San Marzano tomatoes, lightly topped with just enough cheese. The pizza at Trianon was amazing, and easily the best pizza I have ever had. We ordered a margherita (tomato, cheese, basil) and added some Italian sausage (which was fantastic). We both drank the house red wine, which was a local varietal that I was not familar with called Lacryma Christi. I believe that translates as, "Tears of Christ," and it is made from grapes grown in the volcanic soil on the slopes of Mt. Vesuvius. It was quite good. There is a white variety too, but I did not have a chance to try it while we were in Naples.
Old and rundown, dirty, chaotic, hot; I haven't painted the prettiest picture of Naples and one may wonder why we went there at all. It wasn't just to have the best pizza in the world, but also because it was convenient to the archaeological site of Pompeii. Pompeii was about 45 minutes away by train. We had booked for today with a tour company to have an archaeologist guided tour of both Pompeii and Herculaneum, the two ancient Roman cities preserved for centuries under the ashes after the eruption of nearby Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. This turned out to be a bit of a fiasco, mostly of our own making. We had booked the tour for 10 AM this morning. We told the concierge at the hotel last night that we were doing this today and he concurred that taking the train would be easy. He informed us that the entrance to the archaeological site was only about 100 meters from the train station and he looked up train times to let us know what time we should catch the train to be there in plenty of time.
So, this morning, we set off for the train station. It was a bit hard to navigate not knowing Italian (and, it turns out we were never in the main part of the train station that morning), but we managed to find a stand where we could buy train tickets to Pompeii (they were only 3,80 euro) and were directed to the proper platform. The train came more or less when our hotel concierge said it would and we boarded. It was actually a very nice train with comfortable and spacious seats, luggage space, and air conditioning. Seemed more like a passenger train than a commuter train. After we arrived in Pompeii and as soon as we left the station, we saw signs pointing the archaeological site. Easy. It was a bit further than 100 meters, perhaps a half-mile or so, and it took about ten minutes to walk there, but still we arrived in plenty of time. At the gate we passed through a metal detector and a security check but then in front of the entrance I didn't see our tour group. As it got closer to 10, I started to get nervous that we were in the wrong place. I opened my confirmation and it stated we needed to be at the Porta Marina entrance to Pompeii, across the street from a restaurant called Hortus. That's not where we were. We asked the security guard where that entrance and were told that we needed to exit and turn down to the right, "ten minute walk."
At this point, we are going to be late so I sent a message through the booking app, with my mobile number that we went to wrong entrance but were heading to the correct one now (I never received a call or text back and it was only that evening I discovered I had an email from the company). We figured we'd only be 10-15 minutes late and if they knew we were coming, they might wait that long. Well, it was not a ten minute walk. It was more like a 20 minute walk. The correct entrance was all the way on the opposite side of archeaological site and, as we would learn later, the ancient city of Pompeii was large - a city of 20,000 people. It was about another mile walk from the wrong entrance we went to first to the correct entrance. On top of the half-mile from the train station. The temperature was already 94 F with a heat index of 103. And it wasn't even noon. By the time we arrived at the correct entrance we were tired, I had already consumed half of the bottle of water I had bought, and we were now 20-25 minutes late for our tour.
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| Ruins of Pompeii |
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| The mountain (Vesuvius) is out |
almost 2,000 years since Vesuvius erupted. The rooves of houses are gone (as we learned from a passing tour group, they collapsed under the weight of rock and ash, but otherwise the city was totally preserved after being buried in ash. In addition to the initial piazza with its statues, we saw private residences and a small amphitheater (there is a much larger one at the other end of the site where we initially tried to enter, but we didn't make it down there). Most of the residents tried to shelter in their homes to wait out the eruption, but by the time the rooves started to give under the weight of the ash, there was too much ash barricading their doors and they couldn't escape.
After our brief survey of the ruins, we exited the site and walked across the street to the aforementioned Hortus restaurant to hydrate. The seating was outdoors, but the combination of natural shade from trees, cover from a tarpaulin, and fans and mist-machines, it was quite cool and comfortable. We made too important discoveries at Hortus. The first was spremuta mista - a Neapolitan beverage consisting of freshly squeezed orange juice and freshly squeezed lemon juice. Where has this been all my life? So refreshing on a hot day! Anyway, after two of those and a bottle of water, I was feeling much better. After sitting and chatting for a while, I asked Lisa what time it was. It was 12.15. Time to head back across the street to meet up with our group and go to Herculaneum for the second part of the tour. We talked about whether or not to bail on the tour. Neither of us wanted to as we paid for an archaeologist-guided tour, but the heat was really oppressive. Herculaneum is a small site, but it is closer to the mountain and likely hillier. My biggest concern was trying to keep up with a tour guide in the heat. Ultimately, we decided to forgo the rest of the tour.
Which brings me to the second discovery. While we sat recuperating, a train went by just behind the restaurant. When I googled how to get back to Naples from there, the directions were to walk to a different train station that the one we came into and that was only 100 meters from the restaurant (so about 100 meters from the archaeological park entrance that we were supposed to go to (matching what our hotel concierge told us). As it turns out, the train we caught at this station was a completely different train. The price was similar (3 euro) but this was more like a city metro train, not a comfortable passenger train. As best as I could tell, the metro didn't go to the train station we arrived at and that train didn't stop where we picked this one up. In other words - two different trains to two different stops in Pompeii, one of which (the one we took back to Naples, but unfortunately was not the one we took in) would have taken us right to the entrance we needed and we would have shown up there on time and not having exhausted ourselves prior to even starting the tour!
The other thing we were planning to do in Naples was tour the archaeological museum. It was open until 7 PM, so we thought about going this afternoon (Sunday) since we were heading back early. It looked like we could transfer to the metro once back in Naples to ride out to the museum. But, the train ride back was hot and the train station was hot. We were still hot, tired, and a bit jet-lagged, this being our first full day in Italy. So, once we got back to the main train station in Naples, which was by our hotel, we decided to stick to our original plan of going to the museum Monday morning before catching an afternoon train to Milan. Coming off the return train we did walk through the main train station and realized this was where we needed to go to get out train to Milan, not wherever we were in the morning.
After chilling (literally) in our hotel room for a bit and checking out the rooftop deck, we sought out another pizza place for dinner (when in Naples). After walking to two different places reasonably close to the hotel that were well reviewed on Yelp that were closed, we happened upon a place right next to the hotel that had just opened (Ristorante Pizzeria Aladin). The owners were middle eastern and they had Neapolitan pizza and kabobs. Despite not being a purely Italian restaurant or one of the the classic Neapolitan pizzerias, the pizza was still excellent. I am not sure there is a such thing as a bad pizza in Naples.
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| Lisa and I on the roof of our hotel in Naples |
Unfortunately, our plans went awry today. It made me wonder if we were, "off our game," not having done international travel in four years. The situation could have been avoided if:
1) I had paid more attention to the confirmation and researched how to get to the right entrance - which might have led me to realize we needed a certain train to a certain station.
2) We had paid the extra to include transportation from your Naples hotel when we booked the tour
3) We had stayed in Pompeii itself rather than Naples. I didn't think there was anything in Pompeii other than the archaeological site, but there is a sizable modern town of Pompeii and we could have stayed in a hotel more convenient to the tour rather than try to get there from Naples.
4) We had been smarter about not trying to do things in southern Italy in the summer heat and had either gone somewhere in northern Italy (Bologna, Torino) or Switzerland before going to Milan...
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