Disclaimer: this is a really long post. But it’s a good one. If you get tired out, my finest, most exuberant paragraph is last one. Surprise, surprise. So, please read it before you click away. Pretty please. I flat out loved Naples.
I have decided to devote one whole post to the city of Naples. Or Napoli, as it’s actually called. It’s a city older than Rome with lots of Greek heritage, and I think the name may be derived from Neo-polis, or new city. Better google that to be sure. In a sec. Why am I devoting a whole blog entry to Naples? Because it shocked the hell out of me, that’s what. Kind of like the first time you walk through Rome (mine was late at night) and you just happen to stumble upon the Pantheon, just sitting there, just like any old building resting its bones at night, pigeons preening in its joints. Jaw dropping, heart pounding, can’t believe this place can exist without people just screaming all the time, “can you believe we’re here, we’re actually here, that this amazingly beautiful ancient important place is here, and we’re here, just looking at it while eating ice cream and pizza and talking on our phones and stuff like it’s no big deal…?!?!?” Ya, Napoli was kind of like that, too. But different.
So let’s start.
Why Napoli. My baby sister (Junior Indiana Jones I will call her) and I just had to see Pompeii. Had to. We had the most time in Italy out of all the family (this was a family vacation that brought us out from the four corners of the globe), so the two of us promptly took a train from Rome to Napoli, and then planted ourselves (via the Circumvesuviana train — and it’s pronounced “Chir-cum,” as in very-sexy-Italian-accented way to say “around Mount Vesuvius”) in the safe enclave of Sorrento. Kind of like a southern suburb of Naples, really. See, Sorrento is safe. It’s lovely. But also a tourist haven, lots of resorts, etc. It’s a great place to be located to get to both the Amalfi coast and to Pompeii and other archaeological sites…without having to set foot in Naples. Yup. Naples makes people nervous. We, too, were under the impression that we had to get in and get out fast and keep everything tucked in and zipped up tight and look straight ahead and pray that nobody dares even speak to you. Naples means mafia. Naples means tough kids. Naples means dirt. Naples means poverty. Naples means congestion. Basically, as far as Italian cities are concerned, Naples is just the wrong side of the tracks. Period.
As I understand it, it kind of only half deserves this bad rap. It’s a city like any other. It’s got a huge port, so lots of industry. People go to work and come home from work. There’s a great university. But, yes, there is some bad poverty, and the gang violence is kind of crazy. Sometimes. The police really did some good work in the 80s and 90s cleaning up, I think. But it’s nothing a tourist would see. You probably couldn’t find this stuff unless you asked and
Gomorra
went looking for it. As a deterrent against you doing this, though, feel free to watch the recently released film, Gomorra. I nearly shat myself during this movie, based very closely on true stories, the author of which cannot return to Italy because the gangs have a price on his head. I couldn’t believe I was going there.
So why the hell go? Because the finest archaeology museum in all Italy happens to be in Naples. The best mosaics from Pompeii were taken there. Stuff from all over the region and beyond. Junior Jones was dying to see it. And another damned good reason to go to Naples? The pizza. It’s the birthplace of pizza. You got that right. And it is the best, and I mean the very, very, very, very best. But we’ll get to that later. We were planning a quick in and out. Get to our hotel, sleep, wake, go to the museum, grab a pizza, then grab the bags and get the hell outta Dodge. God, was I in for a shock.
See, Junior and I arrived kind of half drunk, half hungover, rushing into town from our wonderful sun-dappled day on the Amalfi coast. Ya, it was kind of stupid. But kind of really fun. Ultimately, it might have been the alcohol that made us completely un-paranoid as we got into town. See, we tried to get in during daylight, thinking, it’s a dangerous town, let’s get in before it gets dark. Our drunken timing was questionable. We got there as twilight was ebbing gracefully away and hence caught the first cab at the station, one that luckily had GPS as neither we nor the driver could find our hotel on a map.
The Portanova Hotel is an enchanted dream of B & B. The most lovely B & B I have ever stayed in in my entire life. So nice, in fact, that it rightfully deserves some four or five hotel stars. And it’s on this dark, curved, tiny little street that you can barely find on the edge of the historic city center. It’s on the second floor (with a steep climb, I might add), of an ordinary apartment building. And Jones and I paid all of 60 Euro for a huge bedroom with a king size bed, luxurious sheets and duvets, sparkling bathroom, organic-esque shampoos and soaps and cotton wool and Q-tips and plush towels, a flat screen TV, and all of it elegantly designed. Class. Like cutting open one of those wrinkled, brown, awful testicle-looking fruits and discovering the many seeded, bright orange, glistening pulp of a passion fruit. If you’re ever in Naples, it’s your duty to look up and stay in the Portanova. Remember. Portanova. Because not only was it sinfully inexpensive, the owner was one of the kindest human beings I could have hoped to meet on this trip. He waited for us patiently, gave us maps, invited us to eat anything we wanted in the kitchen, coffee at all hours, free umbrellas to use in case it rained. Basically, the best concierge service, bar none, in the body of this kindly salt and peppered middle aged Italian guy with very little English to spare us. And we were the only guests at the hotel. It broke my heart to pay so little. Portanova. Remember it.
Back to Napoli. Will you read this far? Good Lord, do I know how to meander. Maybe I’ll intersperse this long text with pretty pictures. We all like pictures.
Junior Jones and I had to really force ourselves to go out that night. The real reason ended up being hunger. Kind of. We were hungover and feeling sick. But we couldn’t just check into a hotel at 8pm and stay in. Couldn’t. It’s not in our family ethos. And what we saw was this:
- Churches. Everywhere. More than any other city in Italy I’ve been to. Every other building. Elegant, imposing, grand, intricate, you name it, from many different centuries and decades and national styles. These were some exceptionally designed important buildings.
- Very narrow streets, so much so, some of them seem like pedestrian shortcuts, that you very dangerously discover are not only for pedestrians.
- Historic churches lining these minute lanes, ever other building or so. I’m not kidding. You have to crane your neck to even kind of try to see the architectural detailing. You can’t stand back at a nice, respectable distance, and just look at these monuments. It cannot be done.
- Renaissance mansion houses. Think “Capulets and Montagues.” Think huge, vast, tall arched wooden gates with iron spikes and bolts and stuff as a doorways. Think lush courtyards, fountains, stairways, balconeys. Think mini-castles. Now, picture these structures being the buildings between the churches. You got it. Tiny lanes. Ridiculous amounts of churches and important buildings with gargoyles and statues and steeples and stuff everywhere. And then, these gorgeous, monstrous, oddities of I don’t know, medieval rich-people houses, just everywhere. And now, they’re kind of cut down into individual apartments, a lot of them, and the front doors are too massive to open, so they cut, and I mean cut out like with a jigsaw, people sized doors into these vast almost draw-bridge looking things. And these are tiny, tiny narrow streets we’re talking about. You can hardly see the sky! You can hardly see to the top of the front doors!
- Cobbled streets
- Funky punk clothing shops
- The laundry everywhere, ya, it’s true
- Oh, a street that is basically still a “guild street” with every single shop being a nativity doll and diorama making facility. I’m not kidding. Seriously. A long north-south street with hundreds of thousands of Marys, shepherds, wise men, baby Jesuses, mangers, and for some reason clowns dressed up for commedia dell’arte or mardi gras or something. And they’re all great. These little dolls are so frighteningly real looking. And old men whitle them away in the shops in plain sight, all day long. It’s like being in a strange fruit and veg market, lots of colors and choices, and it all looks so good, you want to buy something, you just have to, but who the hell needs a thousand wooden baby Jesuses or scary clowns?
- Some really fine graffiti. Most seemed to be by one artist in particular. I’ve started noticing and documenting this kind of artwork in recent years, and I can tell you, I could have gone around with a camera, ignoring the churches and monuments and Mary dolls and pizzas, all day long.
- Fab, tiny, hole in the wall, the Naples equivalent of a Vienna Beef hot dog stand, pizza restaurants. And this is it. The very best.
- No tourists. Nope. Even in the height of day, the tourists we saw were led in groups. On the bus, off the bus, on the bus, off the bus. Mostly Germans. Some Brits. Middle aged. Wearing fanny packs (aka bum bags). Matching hats. Beware the pickpockets…it’s Naples…oooh!
Wow, I’m getting tired. I think you get the picture. It’s amazing. It’s dark, it’s light, it’s really old, and really young, it’s hip and fun, and it’s creepy. It’s a really great time. The pizza we had was at a tiny place with about 6-7 tables in it. Pizzerias in Naples that want to have customers usually opt to be certified. Yes, there is a pizza certification. There’s a symbol they put outside the restaurant and everything. It has to do with how the pizza is made, not just the ingredients. And it boils down to this: the dough MUST be thrown, NOT rolled, into your standard circle; AND the oven must use real burning wood, not gas, charcoal, or anything else. And they are wonderful pizzas. Thin, woody, tiny burnt bubble-patches underneath. The top is soft, even kind of watery-hot with all the toppings (not in a bad way at all). Get the Pizza Margherita. The simple standard. It’s named after the first queen of Italy. She came to visit Napoli, and the chefs wanted to make a special dish in her honor. Well, she would have nothing fancy. She wanted to taste local cuisine. So, they made a pizza for her. Red tomatoes, white buffalo Mozarella, and green fresh basil leaves. Red, white, and green: the Italian flag. Simple, tasty, and it will only set you back something like 3 Euro. Again, not kidding. Our water cost the same. And it was the cheapest water we bought in all of Italy. You usually can’t even buy a pre-made sandwich for 3 Euro. This is a whole pizza. The very best.
Another fun thing we did was take a tour of “Underground Napoli.” Essentially, it’s a great informative tour of the Roman aquaduct system. Except it didn’t used to be. These underground caverns were first dug out by the Greeks for stone to use in building buildings. Romans did, too, and built one of the largest arenas in the land. Nero, the crazy emperor who fancied himself a singing virtuoso, actually performed in this Napoli theatre…to the misfortune of the citizenship’s ears. We got to see some of the theatre, but only a tiny part — because after years of looking, they finally found it less than ten years ago! See, old cities grow taller. When a house falls down, they didn’t clear rubble. They sort of used what they could, and them built over it. So, over the centurues, European cities grow higher. By meters and meters. The streets might have the same layout and everything. We’re at a totally different altitude. And what happened to this vast Roman theatre? Some parts of it, arches, doorways and stuff, just got incorporated into the basements of medieval houses. Yup. Here’s a perfectly good wall. Let’s just leave it, use it, and put drywall over it. This family that had owned this old townhouse for many, many generations, had no idea that their house was largely composed of Roman walls from the theatre! Back to these underground passages and cisterns — they were also used as air raid shelters for civilians during WWII. Half the population of the city could fit inside. The unfortunate slept outside. Literally. In the street. It was safer than inside the buildings that could crash on top of you and crush you to death. This tour at one point had us light 
candles and walk through a passage of rock so narrow that I had to turn sideways in order to make it. And I’m not overweight. There was an obese German woman on the tour who tried, and then had to back out. Her slightly less obese boyfriend did make it, but I don’t know how. At least he didn’t take the lead. It would have taken forever. I’m not trying to be cruel here. It was exceptionally narrow. At the end we saw what a full cistern of water looked like, as they had saved one. Like an underground waterfall and pond. So enchanting. I do recommend this tour.
But say, why did we take this tour in the first place? Why did we spend so much time walking around town? What gives? The perceptive reader of this blog would have noticed that the planned itinerary involved only one museum and a slice of pizza. Shucks! Shucks, I say! I would have loved to have stuck to the plan, I would have! Yes, indeedy. But, see, we came on a Tuesday. And on Tuesdays, museums are closed in Naples. Had I read the fine print in my Lonely Planet, I would have figured this out beforehand. But as I was petrified of Napoli and avoiding the thought of having to spend the night, AND I was pretty out of it doped up on prosecco and limoncello, I didn’t bother to read the fine print about opening hours. So, the only reason we came to Napoli in the first place, the famed museum, was a no-go. And lucky for us. Because if we had seen only this museum, we wouldn’t have gotten to trot all over Napoli. And we hardly scratched the surface. I’m almost embarassed to have written this ridiculously long blog entry about my less than one-day experience in this fascinating city.
So – the verdict is – go, go, go to Napoli. Spend more than a day. And don’t go on a Tuesday. Or, do, actually. You’ll see more. And to conclude so ungracefully here as my eyelids droop (3:05 am)…
I’m a writer. I have been around art, artists, actors, musicians, writers for my entire life. And let me tell you, I was inspired here. There was something about the quality of the light. Something very real here. Some deep sadness. It’s really grabs you. I wanted to cry. Why is it so empty? Why are there breathtakingly beautiful buildings decaying away on a side street? Why is the pizza so damned different here? I can’t believe Hemingway didn’t find his way here. I’d write an in-depth guidebook to this city. I’d write a novel and set it in this city. I’d come to this city for a 6-month stay, just to live here. Just to breathe the air and meet the people and walk the streets and maybe finally get to see the inside of the museum. There’s something eerily peaceful here. Like the people are guardians to an ancient secret. They know it. But they go on with their lives with a hint of a smile, shopping for their groceries, riding their Vespas, studying for exams, going to work, breathing in and out. It smells faintly of solitude. Of being the unwanted underdog. Of quiet pride. Of steady survival. Of dirt, of clouds, and rays of sunshine fighting their way through.
Go to Naples. You won’t regret it.
I have a severe vitamin D deficiency.
