Cefalu!

When we last checked in, we’d arrived in Cefalu after a pretty disappointing spell in the car. But that at least meant we got into town early enough to unpack at a relaxed pace and grab some pool time before the Miners arrived (they'd spent the day visiting Pat’s family’s ancestral home Termini Immerese, an idyllic little beach town his ancestors found so distasteful they left it for places like west suburban Chicago and Omaha, Nebraska.) In a stark contrast to our last hotelier, the owner of our Cefalu hotel was bursting with enthusiasm to welcome us. We were once again the only Americans around, while the remainder of the guests were Brits with small kids, and one unfortunate Scandinavian family whose teenagers would become the inadvertent victims of our children's screaming and splashing all week. 

After a first day of awkward interactions with the British kids, the Gholson and Miner children made fast friends with them, and each day henceforth they would form giant conglomerations of Child in the pool and yell and scream and make up games and say they type of endearing things kids say when they meet foreigners: “Wait, you don’t have [name of show or candy or brand] where you’re from?” “You pronounce that word wrong!” Etc. Juliet took me aside and, not wanting to be rude to her new friends, asked me quietly why “they talk with an accent, but we talk regular?” Some good personal growth going on! To top it off, James spent much of our daily pool time chatting with a cute English girl named Sadie from “county Somerset.” He sheepishly denied any romantic interest, of course, but was clearly delighted when she left him her email address at the end of our stay.

Carrying Juliet is small British girl

The one drawback to our hotel was that it was set back aways up the mountain; a small price to pay for a place with a pool and space from the madding crowd (see below), but it meant either walking down the mountain 25 minutes on dangerous roads or driving a few minutes through narrow and heavily congested streets to the main parking lot just outside the old quarter. Cefalu was especially packed the first few nights of our stay owning to its major annual festival being on—the Feast of the Most Holy Savior. This is a deeply religious town, and it takes the religious aspect of its celebrations seriously, but it also takes the 'eating well beyond satiation' and 'late-night partying to loud Eurotechno' bits of it seriously, too. 

As we did mostly the same thing each night we were in Cefalu, I’ll just describe the general town vibe once and you’ll get the idea: a Sicilian town in the middle of the throes of its festival is a bit like a crowded Jersey boardwalk on a sweltering summer night, but mixed in with the scantily-clad lovers and nighttime beach goers are extended families, old people, tourists, and lotsa little kids running around (Catholicism means after all, as Joyce says, “here comes everybody.”) Every street is filled to bursting, every musician is out playing, every restaurant fills its square with scents of Sicilian cuisine, every vendor loudly hawks his wares, and spanning every street are arced Mardi Gras-colored light fixtures that make me wonder if, given its own Catholic roots, there isn’t an ancestral relation to Mardi Gras. Note the repeated use of the word “every” in the last sentence, as there’s nothing held back for the festa. It is a sensory overload, a somehow more intensified version of the Sicilian norm (which is already pretty every). 

Southern Italy leads the rest of Europe in the “right-sizing” revolution, less perhaps for environmental reasons than that it’s just poor. Things are small. Streets, parking lots, cars, aisles in shops, appliances, clothes. Naples, a city of several million, is crowded with people, pets, cars, and mopeds. Everywhere you turn, someone is right on top of your body, trying to squeeze by or get around you, or grab something on the shelf you’re perusing. Small towns like Cefalu operate on the same reduced scale, so whereas you might assume, à la America, fewer people means more room to breathe, it’s actually just the same claustrophobia writ small. There's no waste, nothing unnecessarily large. Someone else is pretty much always going to be up in your personal space, whether you're competing with cars and Vespas and dogs and fellow pedestrians just to walk down the narrow streets or trying to contort your body into your chair at a cramped restaurant. Add to this picture several thousand more tourists and revelers in town for the festival, and crank the temps up to almost 100 degrees, and you’ve quite quite the heady stew going.

On the holy day itself—Aug. 6th—we didn’t even bother to try to drive and find parking, instead we tread the dangerous roadway down the mountain. The town was hot and packed, with crowds surging toward the waterfront for the famous 'Ntinna a Mari event. This is one of those local traditions of no consequence that the internet discovered and amplified and now is a “thing,” to the point where even Red Bull is spending millions of dollars draping its logo all over it. Basically, a member of each of Cefalu's fishing families attempts to walk to the end of a greased telephone pole that’s been extended out over the harbor and grab a flag affixed to the end. Most of the contestants slip right off the pole and into the water within seconds and we all get a good laugh (the trick seems to be to really gun it from the get go. As soon as you lose momentum, it’s into the drink for you). The event kicks off with a quaint little marching band-led procession, in which a very old couple sweltering in medieval garb carries the aforementioned flag to the harbor. Nowadays, this little procession is preceded by that stupid Red Bull Mini Cooper with its giant Red Bull can mounted on top. It made its way slowly through town to the pier, which had been bedecked with Red Bull banners and umbrellas. The spectacle was ridiculous. This trifling diversion, initiated only so local fishermen could have a bit of harmless fun at the expense of their buddies, now swarmed by influencers and awkwardly aggrandized by a multinational corporation hoping to get its logo in the background of their pictures. 

Scoping out the contest

Beating the heat with lemon granitas

We watched the 'Ntinna a Mari for awhile, but the gap between contestants lengthened as the competition stretched on, with many mentions of Red Bull and the like. No one had really gotten very close to the flag. We beat the heat with some lemon granitas (basically upmarket Icees, yum) and a few cold beers, then shopped around town a bit. The kids of course were driven as if by magnets to the tchotchke bodegas, which all sell the same crap. James bought a knock-off Palermo FC jersey, Juliet got a ring. Continuing uphill, we visited the remarkable Duomo di Cefalu, part of the collection of Norman-era UNESCO World Heritage sites of northern Sicily. I'm just pleased as punch my kids enjoyed medieval churches as much as I do, and they did really well in here. The Cathedral's draw is its remarkable, mid-12th Century mosaics, featuring Christ Pantocrator (Christ as ruler of the universe); a highly interesting factoid is that the biblical passage in Christ's hand ("I am the light of the world...") is written in Greek. That the later Palermo Cathedral features a similar motif, but the language is in Latin, testifies to the more diverse, Eastern and African-oriented character of Sicily at the outset of the Norman conquest, and to how its culture shifted to a more Western-orientation under Frankish authority. Admittedly, this last bit was lost on Juliet. Stepping outside, it's hard not to imagine you're in the Holy Land. Built initially to serve the dual purpose of church and fortress, the Cathedral's blond stone seems to glow in the late afternoon sunlight. Surrounded by palm trees and backed by the naked stone of La Rocca, Cefalu's towering headland, the church (and here I will indulge in Gen Z verbiage I otherwise find noxious) gives strong crusader vibes. The effect is completed by being hot as hell.

Zoom in for some Greek

Duomo-in'

I was keen to hang around for the procession of the statue of the Most Holy Savior through town, though in characteristic Sicilian style it wasn't slated to take place until after 8 PM. Most of the kids were tuckered out by then; Pat volunteered to take Juliet back with Luke and Caitlin, and Erica, James, Paige, and I stuck it out. I wasn't disappointed (I can't speak for the others). We managed to snag a spot along the route in the main square. The procession was composed mainly of old folks in various getups that indicated to which sodality or religious fraternity they belonged. Then there were the local politicians and other dignitaries, a couple of groups of guys wearing what looked like 18th Century military uniforms, then the clergy. After them came the statue of Jesus as the Most Holy Savior (striking a Touchdown Jesus-type pose), carried by a horde of sweaty gentlemen struggling under its weight. Last were a crowd of parishioners, who smiled and waved at friends in the "regular people watching regular people" manner of the Southside Irish Parade. Eventually, the crowd surged into the street and melded with the parade second-line style, following the statue as it made it's way through town. We didn't follow it far, but broke off and headed back uphill to our hotel. What a day!

Most Holy Savior statue

Nighttime Revelers

As this entry is getting long, I'll just summarize the rest of our stay quickly: pool time, beach time, restaurants. Of these, the beach is of real note (though the food was damn tasty). Like San Vito, Cefalu has clear water and fine sand. We were concerned that the beaches would be super packed before we left, and we weren't wrong. Thankfully, the private lido system kind of keeps the crowd in check. No one competes for beach space of spreads out their blankets to agglomerate more room than they need when you're given two beds and and umbrella. Nice and orderly. Our lido, Lido Gold Beach, also had a little bar-restaurant on site, meaning we could take beers and sandwiches back to our chair between dips in the ocean. On Friday, we each paid 10 euro for 50 minutes worth of play on the inflatable obstacle course anchored in the deeper water off the beach. As I am no longer a spring chicken, I predictably hurt my shoulder and pulled a few muscles climbing around and jumping off the thing, but we all had a blast. Worth every penny.

Beach pics!

And

And

And

Sunday morning was to come very early. Like, 2 AM early, as we needed to get to Palermo airport by 4:15 AM for our 6:10 flight to Rome. But sleep never came, as it turned out, as Erica and I spent what little of the night there was trying to rebook our newly cancelled flight from Rome to Chicago. But that's a tale for a subsequent entry...

Until then!

San Vito Lo Capo

Saint Vitus of the Cape sits on a beach at the end of a lonely, arid headland at the far northwest edge of Sicily, tucked in at the base of the 1745 ft. Monte Monaco. It’s by and large spent the centuries snoring here in the sun, nursing a (recently defunct) seasonal tuna fishing industry and takin’ ‘er easy. Some pirate raids in the 16th century prompted the locals to erect a series of watch castles along the coast, and that was most of the action of the previous half millennium. Change came to Sicily with Unification in Rome, and change came to Palermo with industrialization and then the denuding of the mob, but very little’s changed in San Vito

Monte Monaco

Though it’s only been in the last few decades that has tourism has blossomed here, thanks to an improving Italian economy and the spotlight of social media, San Vito retains much of its small town, middle-of-nowhere feel. The draws here are San Vito’s crystal blue waters and world class white sand beach, a rare combo in Europe. One of the delights of visiting San Vito as an American is that even though you’re in a touristy place, you’re still treated to a resolutely Italian experience. We encountered no other Americans (and only a handful of Brits) and most of our interactions took place with people who spoke little or no English.

I’ll mostly skip the trip to the trip to the doctor drama, as we covered that in the last post. We slept in the first morning, until almost 10, which everyone needed. We had made some beach chair reservations at a nearby lido, to which we made our way around 11:30, sans Erica and Juliet, who were taking it slow in the condo on account of the ebbing fever. One of things you have to accept about Italian beaches is that most of the space, and certainly all of the good space, is taken up by private lido clubs which rent you beach chairs and umbrellas. By law, there is always technically a free beach, but it’s inevitably over next to the pier or where the rocks are, and due to the vagaries of currents and tides and whatnot, where the trash and natural detritus of trees and seaweed tends to accumulate. The good parts are privatized, though fees are generally pretty nominal. When we arrived at Aurora Beach Club, a teenager porter ushered us to our chairs and slapped the sand off them. We then swam and read and did typical Italian beach things, such as watch old guys in speedos smoke and drink espressos in the blazing hot sun. We ordered lunch and drinks, which came right to our station. Juliet and Erica did show up for a bit, but the poor girl got cold and headed back, once again barfing up her meds. The rest of the day played out as it had been, alternately lying on sun loungers and floating in the clear, amniotic waters.

Carribbean-esque

As an American, your schedule is a good three to four hours ahead of the typical Italian person’s (and don’t get me started on Spaniards, whose schedules are so pushed-back they seem neither to ever go to bed at night or wake up in the morning). Out of respect for our hosts, Pat and I delayed as long as we could to take the beach-weary kids to dinner, so we didn’t arrive at the restaurant until 7 PM. It was empty. In fact it stayed empty, except for us, for the entirety of our meal. When it was over, Pat walked the kids back to the condo for a movie (Men in Black), while I met up with Erica and at doctor’s office. Thankfully, this visit lasted only a hour. Juliet and Erica were hungry and Erica tried to convince Juliet to just get some takeout and go back, but Jules insisted on a sit down meal, and Erica relented. I went back to the condo and picked up James, and we met the gals halfway through dinner. Look how happy they were to be vacationing like regular folks!

Happy Diners

For Monday, we’d booked a cheap day trip on a snorkel boat tour to the waters off the Zingaro Nature Reserve. The Zingaro is a long, narrow strip of arid headlands with ancient ruins and dramatic cliffs that plunge hundreds of feet into the clear blue sea. The rusty ol’ boat captain only spoke Italian, though for our sake he kindly followed up each of his announcements over the boat’s loudspeakers with a little recorded English-language version of what he’d said. And after he learned we were from Chicago, he even switched the morning’s musical accompaniment from generic eurotechno to music from the band Chicago (though not the good, early, rocking Chicago, but the schmaltzy, later, Peter Cetera-era Chicago). Clearly a man who’s eager to please. I won’t say the snorkeling was amazing, but who cares? We did see a few neat species of fish, but today was all about the warm water and the views and just cruising around on a boat in the Mediterranean, waving at other people cruising around on boats in the Mediterranean. Who’s better than us, eh?

Sadly, Erica didn’t get to come, as Juliet was still within the contagious window (we decided it was a trade off for her getting to go Capri, but as I then immediately cashed in on that by going to Pompeii with James the next day, the scales were tilting quite a bit against her. (And at this point it is incumbent upon me to insist that marriage is not best thought of as a competition, and vying for strict mathematical equality is not even desirous anyway as the vagaries of real life mock reductionist attempts to square the the various domestic labors. Plus there are some kinds of things she will insist on doing even when it’s clear she’s done enough, like be the one to sit with Juliet in the bowels of a dumpy-ass children’s hospital while I go find an open pizzeria with James. Anyway, back to the narrative!)) When we docked, I got out a 20 to tip the captain, but a breeze blew it into the water and the captain had to fish it out. Working hard for the money!

After the boat, we met up with Erica and Juliet, who were chilling on the beach. It was so nice to see Juliet back in action, and she was delighted to be reentering vacation life. Bridget came out to dinner with the gang, so we were at full strength. Indeed, we stayed in the water well into the evening, until after 7 PM, just chattin' it up and takin' 'er easy.

The whole happy crew

We had dinner at Cortile de Cerere in a lovely open courtyard under the canopy of a lemon tree. The local speciality here is couscous, owning to the Sicily’s long history of Arab settlement, and my seafood-couscous-red fish sauce entree hit the spot real nice. James had the penna all Norma, then ordered a big bowl of bolognaise to follow it up, the growing boy. Wanting to blend in and actually enjoy the evening scene in town, rather than go back home and put the kids to bed at a reasonable hour, we drug our feet on the way to the gelateria, then idly perused some shops. By 10 PM, the restaurants were full to bursting, strands of twinkle lights were shining in the palm trees, and walls of the alleyways were reverberating with the sounds of local crooners—of varying ability—serenading diners and sunburnt and tired-but-happy passer-bys. 

Food blog shot

San Vito streetscape

Our time in San Vito was lamentably short. The plan was just to get some downtime there, before picking the pace of the trip back up again. We checked out of San Vito at 9:30, but not before some old harridan came to our apartment to, basically, make sure we hadn’t done anything to it. She berated us for getting the trash sorting wrong, then walked through the place and tried all the lights, in an accusatorial way. The whole thing was a bit galling; first, I don’t appreciate the presumption of guilt. Second, and as the customer, I’m not used to being the one who must prove their worth vis-a-vis a provider’s expectations—this seems a reversal of the order of nature. How about, “how was your stay?”

One of the main reasons we chose Sicily is that could visit Erica’s family’s hometown of Castelvetrano, about 1.5 hours drive south of San Vito. Unfortunately, out of control forest fires are currently burning their way toward the town, and our way was blocked. Instead, we headed toward Monrael, a suburb of Palermo which holds a UNESCO world heritage-level Cathedral. Monreal turned out to be one of the most congested places I’ve ever experience, and after navigating its narrow, chaotic streets for half an hour looking for a parking spot, we simply left. Driving in Sicily is an extremely trying endeavor, like Crete but more exaggerated in the sheer nonsensicality of its road culture. Sicilians live pretty much right on top of one another, whether that be in massive apartment blocks, in cramped and perpetually-crowded shops and markets, or, in this case, in striving to walk or scoot or drive simultaneously on the same small stretch of single-lane street or road as everyone else on the island. Safely navigating what is essentially always a high-pressure funnel takes some getting used to; even the Sicilians seem to struggle with it, given the number of destroyed side mirrors we’ve seen on care. The scooter’s are the worst, as like bicyclists in the US, they do not follow any of the laws of the road and arrogate to themselves the right to drive wherever they please whenever they please. Long story short here (too late!), the drive from San Vito to Cefalu via Monreal was a trying affair and not one I’m super keen to repeat! 

Up next is Cefalu. Until then.

It Can’t All Be Wedding Cake

Herein commences the account of some weary travelers.

We arrived at the main Naples train station around 10:30 PM, soaked in sweat from the labor of carrying all our packs on the 20 minute walk. Naturally, the station had no air conditioning, and at that time of night, no open restaurants or shops, just a few fellow travelers awaiting night trains and a handful of scattered addicts and homeless persons. I was able to procure a bottle of cold water from a vending machine immediately before we boarded, and good thing I did. Unlike our hour train ride from Rome to Naples, which featured a bar car, this 9 hour train had nary even a vending machine, and no potable water. The first clue that sometime was going to go really wrong was that our car steward had no record of our reservation. I had the ticket in my email, which was on the up and up—I’d bought it from Trenitalia the very day it went on sale—but there was no record of it in her system. As the train was due to depart, she bundled us up the steps and into a reassigned cabin.

Hot times in the sweltering, stagnant station

Our cabin had twin Murphy bunks that dropped from the ceiling and two bench seats that converted into beds. Each held a pillow and sheet packet and a tiny plastic bottle of water. We made up the beds and I hoisted our febrile little Juliet into hers, where she fell asleep immediately. James chatted annoyingly for awhile before eventually drifting off. Erica read while I laid there hoping the air conditioning would hit its stride. Sleep eventually came for her, but not for me, and I spent the night dehydrated, taking small sips of cold water and mentally tabulating our depleting water stores.

Roomies

At about 4:30 am, a tremendous banging outside signaled that our train was being loaded onto the boat ferry to cross the Straits of Messina into Sicily. That the train goes on the boat was a major selling point of this leg of the journey for the kids, but they were both asleep and I was groggy and just anxious to get to Palermo. The second sign that something was wrong was that breakfast was delivered to us at about 5:30 AM, which is extraordinarily un-Italian. (I say “breakfast,” but it was only a small orange juice box and a little muffin thing in plastic wrap.) Evidently, Trenitalia had sent all ticket holders an email previously, detailing changes to the itinerary; work on the northern Sicilian train line necessitated a substitute bus route from Messina to Palermo. But because they’d botched their own reservation process and lost our reservation, we never got one. By the time a porter came and kicked us out of our cabin, the bus we were meant to be on had already left. Unceremoniously dumped onto the streets of Messina, we were forced to cobble together an alternative route to Palermo. Meanwhile, that fever just kept creeping up.

From Messina, we caught a train to Capo D’Orlando, a hour down the line. We debarked into a crowd of large folks, also displaced by train maintenance, a crowd large enough to make one worried about competing for bus seats. Presently, a Trenitalia employee appeared and bid us to follow him through Capo’s streets to what ended up being a bus depot. We all followed, as of this were a perfectly normal thing to be doing. When we arrived at a line of busses, I began to show my crumpled up ticket to a driver, mentally trying to summon enough Italian to explain our predicament, but he didn’t even look at the ticket. He just shewed us on the bus, and away we went. Sadly, the bus did not take the main road to Palermo. Instead, we farted along the slender coast road, stopping every few K to let old nonnas and nonnos on and off. Juliet mostly slept and crabbed while James read and I typed the previous entry of this blog. After four hours we reached Palermo, where we had about 5 minutes to grab our luggage from the bottom of the bus, sprint into the train station, buy a ticket for the suburban train to the airport, hop onto it, and grab a seat. We just made the train just in time, and it was predictably hot and disgusting. After an hour we arrived at the airport.

One of the various legs, I dunno

Decision time: do we get our car and drive back into Palermo to the pediatric hospital because it’s only 35 minutes away? Or do we drive on the San Vito through the mountains and take our chance with the local clinic while I still had some energy (after not really sleeping on the train) and daylight was on our side? We resorted to scouring google reviews of the various options. Palermo’s Childrens hospital owns a stellar 3 out of 5 stars, so that was the tipping point. We drove back into Palermo.

Was it the wrong choice? In hindsight, probably, but I’m not sure it was the wrong one at the time. Palermo is a smaller, equally squalid Naples, full of faded grandeur and dog—possibly, just maybe human—feces and graffiti. The Palermo children’s hospital is sandwiched between several Norman-era sites that comprise a bona fide UNESCO world heritage sites and looks just as tumbledown. I don’t really think it becoming to dunk on what is a seriously strained and struggling public health institution, but daaammmmnnn. At least put some toilet paper and soap in your bathroom. That’s basic hygiene, guys, come on. Other funisms from our visit include:
A.) The doctor telling Erica that Juliet needed to eat something simple, like crackers, then asking Erica if she had any because the hospital didn’t.
B.) The nurse getting blood on Juliet’s clothes when she removed the iv, then asking Erica if she had anything to wipe it up with.
C.) While James and I waited outside in the parking lot, a little boy and his mom came out with a bedpan.
The boy filled it with pee and then took it back into the hospital, presumably for a urine test.

As one harried fellow waiting room mom said to Erica in broken English, “you’re getting to see the real Palermo."

After six hours, Juliet was diagnosed with an unspecified infection and sent packing with a prescription for antibiotics. Erica and I seriously suspected strep, given the giant white spots on her tonsils, but the hospital “didn’t give strep tests.” LOL. LMFAO. So, at about 10:30, we set out for the 24-hour pharmacy, which turned out to be a shady set up involving a single guy behind glass set into an otherwise locked up store front. We got the meds, gave them to Juju, and headed out of town ASAP. I was really getting tired and driving in Sicily is hectic enough, but spirits were generally on the rise. With about 15 minutes left in the drive, Juliet let us know she was bout to hurl, which she did along the side of the road in spectacular fashion. (Augmentin and an empty stomach are a bad combo). We finally reach San Vito at midnight and collapsed into bed.

Now, San Vito is lovely, the Caribbean of Europe, it’s been called, but that’s the subject of a subsequent post. What concerns us here is the fever saga. Juliet awoke in better spirits that she had a right to be in. The fever was reduced and she was committed to enjoying the day. So we gave her some breakfast and her meds and let her chill for a bit before giving her a go in the water. I will say she put on a brave face for about half a hour before complaining about being cold, which is a terrible sign when it’s 93 degrees and sunny out. Then she barked up the meds again.

At this point, any concerned parent is beginning to wonder whether the better play is to pull the ripcord on the whole vacation. But for (what is obviously) strep throat? That seems insane. So we played our last remaining card and took her to the local clinic which operated on the very odd, though kind of Sicilian, schedule of 8PM to 8AM. I won’t say this clinic was any cleaner, per se. It was still very, embarrassingly dirty, and at one point I noticed they didn’t even bother to cover their medical waste trashcan, and I definitely espied some tissues filled with bloody sputum just lying out in the open at the top of the overfilled can like this was a battlefield hospital tent. But being a smaller clinic, it had less overall grime, mathematically speaking. The young doctor took one quick look at her throat and immediately pronounced it strep, and, goaded by our handing him multiple pre-typed out passages on Google Translate about Juliet’s inability to handle straight-up Augmentin, he prescribed a milder form of the drug which kids tend to tolerate better. Yay! Hooray for this guy! and guess what? That worked. It’s several days later and the kid has bounced back spectacularly. 

Bloody sputum not pictured

The little moral of the story is don’t get sick in southern Italy. I won’t cast aspersions on the doctors themselves, they do what they can with what they have, but the facilities, their standards, and just the entire medical culture surrounding care, are appalling—and should be embarrassing—for a first world nation. It was clear from our interactions with staff, too, that they were used to dealing with patients who accepted the status of things. Despite a total lack of organization and obvious professional mis-steps happening all around, none of our fellow patients’ families said or did much advocating for themselves. They mainly just stood around in the heat and sweat and smoked.

Next time, I’ll have a happier report. San Vito is great. Toodles!

Napoli and Beyond

I left you on a cliffhanger last entry, and I’m sorry to say Juliet was NOT up for the boat trip to Capri. She awoke fussy and a bit warm, but we gave her some ibuprofen and a coke and took the train down to the harbor in the hopes that by the time those kicked in, she’d feel better. I SAY we took the train, but it was in fact a journey requiring two trains, since Naples’ two main Metro lines are operated by different companies, require separate tickets, have different timetables, and are accessed through separate, separated entrances in the main train station. Great city planning! We got all the way to the pier before we called it, so I took Juliet back to the hotel for a day of sleeping and iPad watching in the AC while Erica and James did the Capri trip. As I wasn’t present, I’ll just throw in some pics. The did assure me it was a lovely time (though Erica did say the crowds and prices gave Santorini’s vibes, meaning not in a good way.) 

That evening we ate at Pizzaria Da Michele, the supposed home of Pizza. Perpetually mobbed, this place ends up on all the lists of the best Neapolitan pizza, which is probably why they had Julia Roberts eat here in Eat, Pray, Love [ed. note: I am informed this movie is based on a non-fiction book; but the author ate here surely for the same reason]. We got stuck in the basement of the restaurant’s next door annex, so not quite as authentic an experience as we imagined we’d have. They have only two kinds of pizza, four if you could the one that has some Parmesan sprinkled on it and the one that is just a half-and-half of the first two. It’s Marinara or Margarita for you, since that’s what pizza just is, and anything more is a noxious innovation on pizza purity. Now, I guess if you can credibly claim to have invented something, you get a bit of deference in defining it, but come on. Even if you don’t think pizza is improved by adding ingredients (which is nuts, the evidence is all around you), it’s still legitimately pizza. Don’t be so snobby and give the customer some deference of their own. Anyway, our pizza was so soupy in the middle, had a hard time eating it without dripping on ourselves, so I’m going to officially cal this place Overrated. Go to Sorbillo instead.

Juliet was STILL not better the next morning, so, lighting another pile of cash on fire, we had Erica stay home with her while James and I walked to the central train station to meet our “Mt. Vesuvius and Pompeii Guided Tour” guides. Wait, you say, didn’t you just disparage such tours not more than two entries ago?  “Cow like and dead eyed,” I believe you said the clientele were? Yes. But lemme just say this: there is no competition for space at either of these places, no human crush. Being in a group here does not distract anyone else from enjoying their visit. Anyway, we really just needed a bus to get us up to the parking lot from which we could ascend Vesuvius' cone, and then transportation to Pompeii (and a guide through that, too). So, we joined Team Mindless Horde for the day and followed around a little blue flag on a stick.

Vesuvius is famous, of course, for destroying Pompeii in 79AD, though we learned that if the wind had been blowing north instead of of south that day, Naples (Neapolis it was called then) would have been buried and Pompeii survived. Pompeii wasn’t “destroyed” exactly, just buried in situ under 30 feet of ash. The eruption changed the course of its river as well as the nearby coastline, so when things settled down and survivors went looking for it they could not even find where it was. Our Pompeii guide told us the Romans didn’t know Vesuvius was a volcano until it blew, they just thought it was a huge mountain among smaller ones, but I’m not sure I buy that? The entire city is constructed with locally-sourced lava stone—you’re telling me they didn’t recognize what that was? The people who also lived on the slopes of Etna and Stromboli? 

The walk up to the top of the cone from the drop off point was no small feat. It was blazing hot and shadeless and the path was composed on lava sand, so for every two steps you took up, you’d slide on back. James and I did fine, but there were clearly older folks and inappropriately-dressed folks who hadn’t bargained for the difficulty. We spent about half an hour traipsing around the top, and got some stunning views of the Bay of Naples and the Sorrento Peninsula (the north side of the Amalfi Coast). We even spied a few whisps of volcanic off-gassing!

Naples, from Vesuvio

The crater. Yikes.

Abut halfway back down the mountain, our bus stopped for lunch at a restaurant specializing in serving up macro batches of pizzas to tour groups and paying kickbacks to the tour companies who use them. It wasn’t that bad, really—Neapolitan pizza is not exactly rocket science—and James and I had a lovely conversation with an older British couple from Lutron about travel and soccer (they were surprised I’d heard of Luton, but I was raised more on the BBC than American programming; it’s mentioned in a bunch of Python sketches). And speaking of kickbacks, we had been promised a “surprise” by our guide all morning, and this turned out to be a mandatory stop at a little bodega next to the pizza place which makes its own lemon-based food and drink stuffs. After a few miserly samples, most of the howd-de-do-dats in our group positively flung their money at the woman running the stall, and James and I used them as a screen to slink outside and have a laugh at the lemon-themed and faux-lava rock tzschokes before getting back on the bus. 

This surprise was a lemon

Next up: Pompeii. We’d seen most of Pompeii’s treasures in the NAMM museum two days prior, and I was therefore prepared for a letdown. No! Our excellent guide Ari opened by acknowledging that while the best artifacts have been removed, Pompeii’s true treasure is in its engineering. And that’s right! This place had runnning water in most buildings, efficient drainage to clean the streets and latrines, water temperature control and heated floors and walls in its bathhouses, and even an efficient system for ensuring proper wheel-widths for the carts and coaches of visiting merchants. Then there was the matter of all the hilarious phallus carvings and naughty paintings in the brothel section, which James speeded past with great alacrity. I liked Pompeii more than I thought I would, and even contemplated complaining in this blog about the relative brevity of our visit to it, especially compared to the overall excursion time dedicated to kickbacking business. But it was approaching 35 C (which approximates in Fahrenheit to “cremate”) and we’d long since sweat through our clothes, so it turned out the length was just right on a day like this.

Vesuvius looks so chill from down here

Erica had spent the day back with Juliet, whose temperature just keep rising. We were scheduled to take the 11:06 PM train overnight to Palermo, but because Juliet was immobilized and there was no where for them to go had they checked out, we ended up paying for a whole another night in the hotel. As James and I were walking back from the post-tour drop off point,  Erica texted me to say that she was taking Juliet to the hospital to have her checked out, with an eye on getting her a strep test. So we met up with them on the way and walked to the hospital together. Now, I mentioned how grim Naples is, and the hospital was no exception. Dirty walls, bad AC, trash piled up around the weedy entrance, honestly this place reminded me of the clinic I worked on in rural Guatemala. However, we did get right in to see a team of doctors and nurses, who seemed far more competent than their surroundings would suggest. They looked Juliet over and ordered a strep test, but here you have to go to a pharmacy and buy the test yourself, then have the doctor administer it. So we found a nearby pharmacy that was open--thankfully this late on a Saturday--bought the test, and hoofed it back to the hospital. Verdict: no strep, so it must be some kind of pernicious virus (SPOILER ALERT: THIS TURNED OUT NOT TO BE CORRECT.) 

This is just the beginning...

When we got back to the hotel, I went out and procured some pizza. Sorbillos is an old Napoli name and big in the pizza world round these parts. It did not disappoint; the Diablo’s was spicy enough to make you feel it, but not enough to make you regret ordering it. The Margherita deserves its accolades. Better than Da Michele, anyway. Then came a lot of time killing as we waited around to leave for the train station. At about 9:45, we set out, bedecked with all of our rucksacks and day packs, into the hot-ass night.

I will stop here, as the adventure about to unfold deserves its own entry…

Ciao!

Napoli!

One of the things you don’t plan for on a mid-summer vacation is getting a bad cold. James returned from summer camp the day before we left with a cold, and although for him it was just some trivial sniffles, Juliet has not been so spared. The last day in Rome she was showing signs of wearing down, and we hoped it would pass quickly, too. Alas. The bug has taken her down.

We left Rome bright and early on the Frecciarossa, Italy’s version of the bullet train, and arrived in Naples in one hour’s time. Even hopped-up on ibuprofen and Coco-Cola, Juliet was tired and sullen. The plan was to drop bags, then explore the city, including its world-class antiquities museum which houses the treasures of Pompeii. As in Rome, our hotel is a rehabbed former manse of some 18th-century lordling, complete with ornate ceiling and frescoed walls (it sounds very posh, though these places are surprisingly inexpensive, especially considering how centrally-located they are). The accommodating staff allowed us to check in at 9:30 AM and Juliet pretty much went right to sleep. The early start also KO’ed James, who took an uncharacteristic nap next to his sister (then Erica fell asleep, but that’s hardly newsworthy). I left to do laundry in the hottest, tiniest laundromat in town. With this heat, we’re just churning through underwear. Around noon, I woke James up and he and I headed out to the museum, while Erica stayed in with Juju.

It's pronounced Frek-ari-OH-sa

The NAMM (Museo Archaeologico Nationale di Napoli) is housed in a palatial former university building that’s as ramshackle as the city. We were directed to download the museum map, but that didn’t work, so we spent a good two hours lost in a maze of formerly elegant, now well gone to seed, hallways, passageways, and rooms with forty-foot ceilings, pondering the treasures of the Roman patrimony. Here the priceless collection of gargantuan statues of the Farnese Marbles, there exposed wiring, dry rot, peeling paint, leaking ceiling tiles, weedy courtyards, and vast expanses of dirty blank walls. At one point we stumbled on the amazing House of the Fawn mosaics (many of which are extremely lewd, making for an awkward few minutes for James), and did the best we could to understand them with less-than-adequate signage. We didn’t get to see the crown jewel of the entire collection, the massive Alexander Mosaic, as that was off display being restored (though no one was working on it at 1 PM on a Thursday…). Ditto the impressive Farnese Bull, the largest sculpture ever discovered from ancient times, except it wasn’t even being restored, it was just sitting behind an old tarp and we had to crane our necks to get a glimpse of a piece of it. Meanwhile, the Aphrodite Kallipygos was nowhere to be found. It was only when James spotted it through a window that we went looking for a way into its room, but the door was walled up but some unpainted plywood.

Famous Pompeiian Mosaics!

Hulking Torsos!

Butts!

After the museum, we trekked back through the Old City to our place to check on the gals. Naples is gritty, it’s often said, a city of faded grandeur, and that’s pretty much what we’ve seen. The capital of an independent kingdom for much of its existence, Naples amassed vast wealth in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries and was a hot spot for Renaissance and Enlightenment art, culture, and philosophy. Before 1860, it was the richest city in Italy, and the largest city in Europe after Paris. But Italian unification saw power centralize on the new capital, Rome, and the riches of Naples’ treasury were emptied to pay for the new capital’s expansion and the industrialization of the North. With the money went the intellectuals and artists, and soon poor (and becoming poorer) Napoli and the agricultural south languished, its former glory stagnating while local animosity toward northern bureaucratic governance grew. This lead to the rise of the Commora, the Italian mafia which filled the power vacuum. Corruption damned economic and cultural progress, and some 4.5 million Neapolitans and southern Italians emigrated to the United States. Today, our stereotypical Italianisms—checkered table clothes, Mama Mia!, spaghetti, O Sole Mio, the mob, etc.—derive from the culture of that late-19th Century Naples the immigrants left behind.

The one is Milan does...not look like this

The gritty Spaccanapoli

Cool staircase

Since then, Naples’ progress has been slow, far slower than cities like Milan and Turin in the north. Corruption still lingers, money is tight, and things just kind of fall apart. Scaffolding is everywhere, covered in layers of dirt and graffiti indicating it’s been there decades. Densely packed neighborhoods (this is the densest city in Europe) feature few squares or open spaces, giving the city a congested feel. The streets mainly predate cars and have not been enlarged, and everywhere drying laundry hangs on strings tied between buildings, sometimes for a hundred feet or more over the street. Diego Maradona, the scandal-plagued Argentine who played for the local Napoli team in the 1980s is worshipped here, with shrines and murals with his visage on every corner, and memorabilia sold in every shop in town, suggesting the power of distraction for a people inured by hopelessness. 

When you walk around here, you feel the old. It is fascinating, and I kinda love it, partly because the city still feels so alive. Living in small, grotty apartments (which mainly lack AC) means people spend most of their time outdoors in the streets. Music blares, vendors hawk their goods, and people eat their meals and drink their beer and spritzes standing around gossiping and talking about soccer. 

It’s also partly because I’m fascinated (voyeuristicaly -speaking, I know) by the whole backwards-facing quality of life here. I don’t mean “backwards,” like Neapolitans are rubes. I mean it in the sense that they live now among things that constantly recall previous glory days. This old palace or church was once the bleeding edge of cultural progress, now it’s a grubby shell held up by steel reinforcements (themselves already old as dirt) and some guy has fashioned a makeshift stall in its portico to sell cheap trinkets. There’s pride in this idea—“hey, we may not be great, but we used to be, and here’s proof, right behind this palate of plastic water bottles I’m selling,” but also sadness. 

Augustine referred to this phenomenon as the “saeculum scenescens”—the “aging world”—to indicate the sense in which the world is declining as an old person does. By and large, Rome isn’t like this anymore, it’s too rich now. But it used to be like this, spending much of the last two millennia facing backwards. The Forum, for example, was a cow pasture until the late 19th Century; the Coliseum hosted the events for which it is known for about 300 years in total, but for the majority of its existence has been the refuge of squatters, residing in shacks built up against its walls. Imagine living in Rome in the year 1150, a poor peasant surrounded by decaying architectural glories the likes of which cannot be replicated, the products of a lost know-how it took centuries of political organization to develop, but which is now hopelessly gone. For these folks, everything in the past was better, the future will only get worse. 

Where we live, by contrast, we’re accustomed to thinking of the future. The new technology, the new store coming to town, the new school being built. It’s only in the last few years that, faced with environmental collapse, the uncertainty of AI, and the devolution of democracy around the world, we’ve begun to entertain backwards-facing thoughts (it’s no coincidence that dystopian fiction is now all the rage.) Maybe Naples has something to teach us about getting by in the new world?

Also, this blog entry is long because I’m stuck in the apartment with a sick kid (spoiler alert), so I’m killing time.

Later in the afternoon, James and I beat the heat in the splendiferous Sansevero Chapel, built by one of those dilettante philosopher-alchemist aristocrat type-guys during the Enlightenment glory days of Naples. It has some rad sculptures, including this little number. We then visited the Duomo, the city’s cathedral. It’s a delightfully unbesmerched-by-the-Baroques gothic church which houses the bones of the city’s patron, St. Januarius (St. Genaro, in Italian). They also have the mysterious relic of a vile of the saint’s blood, which liquified at certain times of the year. It’s a big deal to see this happen, though evidence suggests it’s just a medieval forgery containing a type of ferrous solution that had been developed by local chemists around the same time, funnily enough, that the vile is fist mentioned in cathedral records. Huh! Relic authenticity score: 1.5 - Sure, Jan.

The bones of St. Genaro

On the way back, we scored some excellent street pizza (served folded into quadrants and handed to you on the spot wrapped in wax paper). Erica was napping and Juju was watching Big City Greens on the iPad.  After enjoying the AC for a bit, Erica and James headed out to explore a bit more and return with some pizzas for dinner. The plan was to eat and then play some cards as a family, but we were all pretty tuckered out by then, so we just hit the hay, fingers crossed the girl would feel better by morning.

The real McCoy

WILL JULIET BE UP FOR A BOAT TRIP TO CAPRI TOMORROW? WILL MORE PIZZA BE EATEN? Find out in the next edition of Gholson Family Vacations Dot Blogspot Dot Com!

Rome, Day 3

Today continues the theme of being very, extremely hot. We topped out at 100 degrees again, this time right about when we trudged the 500+ stairs to the top of St. Peter’s, but more on that later.

The first half of the day was a comedy of errors; I got us up too early, sacrificing an hour of sleep in order to arrive an hour before our Vatican Museums entrance time. Juliet has caught James’ cold, and has it worse than he did, so she struggled through the day sniffling and just generally feeling kind of “punky,” as my mom would say. Well, this really came to a head within about 15 minutes of entering the Museums. A guard told us to return a very specific way to the ground floor to get a pass out so Erica could run to a pharmacy for some children’s ibuprofen. But when we got down there, another guard informed us no such opportunity existed, and more than that, because we had descended the exit stairs, we had to leave. He was resolute in the face of my complaints, then Erica’s, but eventually relented and let us take the (very cool, old, fancy) elevator back to the museum floor. Anywhozzle, at this point we all decided just to gut it out, and Juju put on her best face and we marched on.

James and the giant Lacoon

Now, the Vatican Museum is one of the largest and best museums in the world. The bulk of its collection is the personal property of a hundred popes, and represents the absolute best of Antiquity (with a healthy dollop of Renaissance goodness thrown in; Rafael’s Transfiguration, anyone? Da Vince’s St. Jerome, that doing anything for you? There’s even a some Matisses and a Picasso, if modernity’s your bag). James and Juliet are art lovers, at least the classical sculpture part of art. James’ love derives ultimately from his interest in Greek mythology via Percy Jackson; Juliet thinks the naked butts are funny. Look, what gets you in the room, as the saying goes, is not necessarily what keeps you in the room, and whatever it takes for at least one of our kids to become a classicist or medievalist or archaeologist or a student of paleo-linguistics, is fine by me. Erica did a fair bit of piggybacking Juliet through the looooong hike to the Sistine Chapel, which sits at the end of the museum, so kudos to mom. At one point, Juju left her fannypack in a bathroom stall, and retrieving it meant a long conversation with security, who take abandoned bags very seriously. 

We braved the extreme heat (the museum has little to no climate control, which seems insane given the pricelessness of its collection) and battled the crush of crowds to the Sistine Chapel, where we got a rare chance to sit and chat all about Michaelangelo's handiwork. BUT, whereas every other time I've been in the Sistine Chapel I've been able to pass through the loosely-guarded "tour groups only" passageway directly into St. Peter's Basilica, this time the martinet manning the door was giving every guided group a thoroughgoing review to weed out hangers-on like us. So we had to trudge back through the museum to the entrance (over a quarter of a mile away), then another half mile around to the front of the basilica in the blazing sun in order to enter it. Maybe you feel like that's just desserts, but let me just say that rewarding the tour groups with easy passage is incentivizing the very people who make visiting the Vatican Museums so hectic.

Here I choose to indulge my worse angel and interpret the situation in the least flattering light possible. With respect to the tour guides, we are not talking about learned lovers of art here, keen to share their passion with like-minded religious devotees and antiquarians. They are more akin to New York City cabbies (who, I dunno, maybe at one point enjoyed exploring the city in their cabs?), but who are now battle-scarred cynics, speaking on autopilot into mic'ed headsets while they sadistically drive their great hordes of dead-eyed, cowlike customers on an itinerary that includes only to the most famous pieces, with all the charm and charisma of drywall. God help you if you deign to pause to read a placard, you will be unceremoniously barged out of the way and then separated from your friends or family by their whole waddling retinue, who anxiously follow directly in the wake of their misanthropic leader lest they be abandoned in a sea of other helpless souls similarly engaged and miss their bus back to the cruise port. Buying a guide book and taking your time with a small group of friends and family, on the other hand, is a much better way to experience the museum, and at half the cost. If anything, the Vatican should prioritize these serious good and righteous folks and let THEM (us) go into the Basilica from the Sistine Chapel. Yes, yes, money talks and they’re paying a kickback to the Vatican for the privilege of swift passage, but the Popes have been one of the very few global moral voices of our age opposing the Mammonization of everything, so someone (not me, I’m on vacation) should write a strongly-worded letter to Pope Leo on the matter.

Rafael's School of Athens

On our walk to St. Peter’s, we paused for lunch and kids ibuprofen, and given the heat, some medically-necessary gelato. The kids were rightly delighted by the basilica, the world’s largest church, while Erica and I fought to balance our own delight in the sheer artistic and engineering marvel of the church and the twin pangs of the juxtapositioning of this place with the life and times of the poor carpenter, and the callous and cruel means by which funding for the basilica were secured (wars, indulgences, and the like). After touring the upper floor, which includes the lightly-waxed body of Pope John XXIII on display (patron of our home parish), we descended into the crypt to see lotsa pope tombs, including those of recent office-holders Paul VI, JP I, JP II, and Benedict XVI. James remained interested while Juliet was starting to fade. So we headed up again to start our pre-booked climb to the top of the dome.

St. Peter's above

The saint's relics, below

Now, we booked this before we knew it’d be 100 degrees, but we were all still were game, so we went ahead with it. It’s 551 steps to the top; roughly, the first half takes you up to the roof, then up a bit more and you emerge out onto an internal balcony that encircles the bottom of the dome. From here you can see several hundred feet down to the church floor, where the people look small as ants. The kids were pretty well spooked by this (you can’t fall though, there’s an 8-foot plexiglass barrier along the walkway to prevent falls), and Juliet did a bit better with it than James did. After that, you take a series of tight, stepped passageways that wind up between the interior and exterior of the dome at a sideways angle, then a few more hilariously teensy spiral staircases to the cupola at the tip top. This is the highest point in the city, so you get an uninterrupted 360 degree view. If you lived in Rome, you could see your house from there. 

Dome interior view

We did it!

After descending, we completed a lap through the surprisingly modest (though hopelessly overrun) gift shop, where Juliet was talked down from a 20 euro calendar to a 3 euro vial of holy water (“No, you cannot drink that! Put the lid back on!) Afterward, we headed out into the square and over to the bus stop. We’ve pretty much only taken busses in Rome, which are fast, cheap, and efficient once you get used to how the system works (the Metro is limited, given the difficulty of digging under and around so many ruins, so you can’t use for easy access many of the major sites in the city). The bus back was actually air conditioned (sort of), and we took a long siesta in the afternoon. 

Our evening passiagiata began at the nearby Campo d’Fiori, a scruffy square doubling by day as a flower and vegetable market and by night as a lively hang-out spot with restaurants and cafes. Though it was still 93 degrees, the evening scene was popping off, with locals sweating over their piping hot espressos and resolutely refusing to wear shorts. The kids played a bit in the fountain before we wandered over to the massive, oval-shaped Piazza Navona (it retains the shape of the Roman circus that was once here), basically a bigger, livelier version of the Campo d’Fiori. Did we take the time to appreciate Bernini’s grandiose Fountain of the Four Rivers? No! The kids were whining for dinner, so we schlept on (I say “schleped” because one of the writers of this blog was suffering from an acute case of chafing) to our dinner reservation near the Pantheon.

After carbo loading again, we got some gelato and headed to the famous Trevi Fountain. It was typically crowded, so could barely see it at first, but with patience managed to wait out a few tedious instagrammers and their idiotic, self-unaware posturing (one girl had her boyfriend taking hundreds of pics of her with both her phone and a separate pocket camera for that “old school 90s look”) and eventually got up to the railing for an admiring view and a photo of our own. Afterwards, James and Juliet paid a euro each to buy this gross little squishy toy from a street vendor; it does nothing but kind of splat when you throw it on a hard surface, then reform into a ball. Unsurprisingly, they did not long survive.

A single, tasteful photo is all you need

Last, it was off to the Spanish Steps. Man, that’s a cool hang out spot, and right at the foot there’s a neat little potable fountain in the shape of a sunken boat by Bernini’s father, the lesser known Pietro Bernini. The kids ran up and down the steps while Erica and I sweated. The square was crowded with tourists, vendors, young lovers making out, and drunken teenagers (it’s open carry here, people). One could just stay there all night with a bottle of vino and a couple of glasses if one was not with a seven year old whose cold was starting to worsen. So, off we trotted back to the hotel for some well-deserved rest.

Steps and boat

Tomorrow, it’s off to Napoli! Ciao!