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!