Italy from South to North – Day 1: Pompeii and Naples

My friend Aron and I left for Naples on a Friday evening. While I was at work, Aron completed his touristic itinerary for Geneva with a five hour long visit of the CERN. He had arrived from the States on Monday and had since managed to explore much of Paris and French Switzerland. Leaving the office early, I met him at the café below the mission and we headed over to the airport for our 17:20 flight.

We arrived in Naples by seven and reached our hotel at around eight o’clock. On my request, Aron had booked a place very close to the train station. It was on the third floor of a rather derelict-looking building, where we found that the use of an elevator cost 10 cents per trip. The broken glass over the alarm button in the hallway was not very reassuring, and the same could be said of the missing fire hydrant on the mezzanine level. Nevertheless, our room was quite nice and clean, which momentarily distracted us from its near complete absence of soap (when we asked for more, the receptionist gave us tiny bags with a smattering of liquid soap inside).

We felt a little hungry after our long journey, so we soon found ourselves venturing out again for something to eat. By a major stroke of luck, just a few paces from our front door was a pastry shop recommended by my Italian work colleague. We ordered several types of sfogliatellas: I had one with eggplant filling, and then a cremosa for dessert, while Aron tried the sfogliatella frolla.

We visited the same café the following morning, which gave me the chance to try the sfogliatella riccia and a babà (which, I only realised upon receiving it, is a sponge cake doused in a generous serving rum). In no great rush, we then crossed the road towards the train station and bought tickets for the metro to Pompeii.

I had been to Pompeii once before on a school trip, and I was shocked to realise how little I remembered of the city. I could not recall having seen an amphitheatre or a theatre, and I had no recollection of the villa interiors being painted with vibrant colours and various human, animal, and mythical figures. I was also impressed by the sheer size of the archaeological site. It was interesting to note that although we know much about many of the buildings, in most cases including their use and in some cases even the names of their inhabitants, the meaning behind some of the artwork remains contentious. The Villa dei Misteri, for example, may depict the Dionysian Mysteries or simply a wedding in Dionysian style.

While waiting for the train back to Naples, we ate a quick lunch at the station. It was not very remarkable but it did the job (the job being to waste as little time as possible and maximise our use of daylight hours). At Napoli Centrale, we changed to the metro and ascended imperceptibly to Vanvitelli station on the western hill. From thence, it was only a short hike and a few escalator rides to Castel Sant’Elmo, which overlooks the nearby San Martino Monastery and the entire city, offering a beautiful view of Mount Vesuvius in the east.

We spent the last few moments of daylight in the western reaches of the city, having taken the funicular all the way down to Corso Vittorio Emanuele. From the beautiful Galleria Umberto I (a nineteenth-century shopping compound topped with a glass dome), we walked past the Royal Palace all the way to the Ovo Castle. Jutting into the sea, the castle once made a perfect spot to keep political prisoners, but now it does little more than overlook a few restaurants and the nearby harbour.

Mount Vesuvius turned from red to purple to pitch black remarkably quickly, and we figured that with the daylight gone and some time remaining before dinner, we could visit the National Archaeological Museum. It had been relatively low on my list of things to visit in Naples when I drafted my original plans, but I was convinced by all the signs around Pompeii that said the artworks displayed there were replicas, and that many more pieces awaited at the museum.

The collections did not disappoint. We saw the famous painting of Sappho, the bizarre statue of Ephesian Artemis whose top half is covered in bull testicles, and many, many mosaics. Perhaps the most interesting portion of the museum was a collection of rooms dedicated solely to erotic images and sculptures. These had been hidden from the public upon Pompeii’s discovery so as not to tarnish the image of Rome as a model civilisation. Eventually, the collection was made accessible to adult men, and finally to the wider public as well.

For dinner, we ate fried pizza – a Neapolitan specialty specially recommended to me by my Italian work colleague. I cannot say it has become my favourite food. It is rather heavy and entirely too messy, but I did appreciate the fact that the topping to crust ratio was quite high.