The Great Europe Gallivanting Adventure: Naples Part I

16 June 2016

Florence at 5.15am is blue and quiet and beautiful in a graceful way that is different from the grace of Renaissance statues.



We took two more photostrips at the Fotoautomatica machine - we did much better this time! Our 6.50am train was 20 minutes delayed, but to be in the train station with the dawn light breaking and the excitement of moving on was not a bad thing - for from it. Our train went up to 300km/h, 5 times faster than lava flow from a volcano, but that pace was still slow enough to look at the Italian landscape outside of our window. The two speeds - inside and outside a train, within and without a heart or mind or person - always amazes me.

Naples is supposed to be rainy and cloudy today, between 24 and 31 degrees (all taken from a helpful screen inside the train), and we pull into the Naples Station at about 10.15am. At first sight, Naples is grey but hot and humid, very dusty, reminiscent of Malaysia or Vietnam in the hectic nature of its traffic and the abundance of street shops selling mostly pizza and cheaply made textiles and goods. Our suitcases really struggle with the cobblestones and we squeeze to the side of the road to avoid the motorcycle cars that speed past. Giovanni's house is on the third level of an apartment block, and we set our suitcases down and are offered cups of cold water and a hour long quick summary of the rich history and attractions and its surrounding regions. Giovanni is fatherly (Nat's theory is that it is because he has no children of his own) and bald, apart from a little patch of hair sticking out of a crease of skin at the back of his neck, and when he smiles you feel like you've come to a real home amidst the nomadic life of travelling. He plays the song 'Singapore' by I Nuovi Angeli, which he first introduces to us with an animated 'da dun da dun da dun da dun!'



He is evidently proud of Naples, pointing out the incredible sunken city of Baia, the amphitheatre of Pozzuoli which he insists rivals Rome's, Naples' own gems of architecture, art, and of course, food! The finest pizzeria in Naples is Gino Sorbillo, which Nat and I can certainly attest to, and the best gelato is supposed to be Fantasia Gelati, which we didn't manage to try. He was scathing of other cities, calling Sorrento a 'shit place' that is only 'beach, horse, kiss, tits', and similarly pooh-poohing Capri and the Amalfi coast, which he says are simply toys for tourists but don't hold the real substance of Italy.



After that Italian welcome, Giovanni brought us (us being Nat, myself, 4 Germans and 1 Hungarian) into his kitchen to teach us how to make 'the easiest Italian pasta' - garlic aglio olio. His rules were:

1. The garlic must be sliced very thinly, tissue thin.

2. The garlic must be put into the olive oil cold (i.e don't heat the oil in the pan before putting in the garlic)

3. The pasta water must be seasoned only with salt, and kept to thicken the sauce.

4. The pasta must be of good quality - not Barilla, as he was very quick to point out. To Giovanni, Barilla is not pasta.

5.The time taken for the pasta to cook perfectly is the same time one takes to smoke a cigarette in the sunshine on one's balcony.

6. Dried red pepperoncini, a sweet and slightly spicy Italian pepper, is sliced in at the last few seconds.




As someone who generally prefers tomato based pasta rather than oil based pasta, Giovanni's Aglio Olio might have been one of the best pasta I've eaten in my life. We all ate out on the balcony in the sun, and were more formally introduced to the others. There's Adrien, who has a eternally anxious expression, Torben who is quiet with blue eyes, Arber, who asks all the wrong questions but is good fun, and Michele, who has foxy eyes and 2 scratches on his cheek. They are from Hamburg, in Germany, and consider Southern Germans (like those from Munich) arrogant, which annoyed Nat. We also met a Korean, Tae Yong, who I didn't see much for the rest of our time there, and a Hungarian, Lajoc, who joined Nat and I on a walk in the city, to see Naples' architecture.



It was quite grim and grey, but Naples didn't disappoint. It had church after church, all of which Lajoc seemed very keen to enter, but when we got inside he would promptly sit down, and often seemed to fall asleep. Perhaps it was the heat. Perhaps not. Nat and I found it highly amusing. The most stunning thing we saw were the sculptures in the San Severo Church.

One is called the 'Veiled Christ' sculpture, by Giuseppe Sanmartino, which has the figure of Christ, dead, beneath a translucent veil. All of it is sculpted in marble, which makes it impossible to be translucent, but that is the magic of the sculpture. It convinces you to believe that rock can be sheer, which complements both the sacred and sculptural themes of the work as well - can a veil sculpted from immovable rock move up and down in breath, can a dead man come to life again? Is the figure permanently fixed in his stony posture, or, like a sleeping person, could he move if you defied all rules of the church and touched it? Would the cold, hard rock be the warm, soft skin of a person, once-dead, come to life?

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We then took the Naples metro to a station called Toledo, designed by Oscar Tusquets Blanca, where its walls and floor have been covered in shades of blue bisazza mosaics to give one the feeling of being deep in the sea or in space.

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The last part of the day was an underground tour, 119 steps down into an old underground quarry dating back to the 4th Century BC when Greeks used it to extract building materials from the bay of Naples. This underground quarry was then used for water, until after 1885, when it became a dumping ground for the city's inhabitants until WWII. In WWII, the city folk needed to use it as a bomb shelter - and they had to clear out 60 years worth of garbage. So they covered it with concrete for a quick fix instead. It was a good thing they had that bomb shelter too, as in 3 years of the war, more than 28000 bombs were dropped on Naples, and up to 2000 people stayed within that vast underground cavern. You can still see remains of the life people lived underground, including an art project of students who used old car parts to make a tank.

We emerged briefly above ground then to walk to another underground site - an ancient Roman Theatre, now buried under houses in the new city of Naples. The Roman Theatre was discovered in a woman's wine cellar, which was located under her bed through a secret trap door.

After that, we parted from Lajoc, who was after Gino's pizza. We wanted something a bit more familiar, and went on a cereal hunt and discovered the strangest thing - oatmeal seems not to be eaten in Naples, as we couldn't find it anywhere!

17 June 2016

We discovered why our oatmeal pilgrimage yesterday was in vain - Italians rarely eat breakfast, and usually just have a cup of coffee to begin their day! We, however, are not Italian, and so we enjoyed our cereal, bananas and rice milk.

The day before, we'd arranged with the German guys to go to the Herculaneum, Vesuvius and Pompeii together. However, there was no sign of them and so we left for the train station ourselves. On the way to the station we talked about the childhood stories, and I mentioned 'You are Special' by Max Lucado.

"The stickers only stick if they matter to you. The more you trust my love, the less you care
about the stickers."

Words to always remember.




We took the Circumvesuviana train to Ercolo Stavi - Ercolo is what the Italians call the Herculaneum - and listened to 'Everglow' by Coldplay on the way.The first thing I noticed when I stepped off the Circumvesuviana train were all the brightly coloured flowers, brilliant hues of pink against dark green, reminiscent of frangipani. In fact, this was a recurring theme in Vesuvius and Pompeii as well. In places of such death, life sprung more vibrantly than ever from the volcanoes fertile soil and ash. Like nature's wreath to the dead, out of the ashes in all three sites rose beauty that made it impossible to feel utterly morose.

It made me think of how I've come to see Italy as a city of contrasts: Death/life, roaring traffic/a slow pace of life, grit and grime/high Italian fashion, contemporary art/Renaissance art...

The ticket to the Herculaneum was going to be 11 Euro for me and 5 Euro for Nat, since she is an EU student under 25 years, and the ticket to Pompeii would have been another 11 Euros. But the man at the cash register was our Michele, and let us both have a combined ticket for Pompeii and the Herculaneum for 12 Euros!



The Herculaneum is incredibly well preserved, since, unlike Pompeii, it was buried by mud rather than ash, which sealed out oxygen and moisture. Some of the things we saw included a woman's bath house, a mill stone, a baker's oven, urns for wine and grain and the grisly remains of skeletons.

A bus took us to Vesuvius, climbing up the twisting paths of the mountain and showing us the gorgeous views of the Bay of Naples below. A man beside us kept exclaiming 'Bellissimo!' and took pictures of the view furiously.




The climb was steep, and the route was rather unsteady, but we had the view of Naples on our right and with that, you can't really complain. At the crater, we went on a rather garbled free tour - during which I struggled to pen down what the guide was saying while suppressing a rising tide of giggles, which occasionally erupted. We walked halfway around the rim and peered into its 330m deep crater, and then began our descent, skittering over the loose rocks and just managing not to twist our ankles.




As we reached the bottom, we spotted a few familiar figures in the distance. 4 figures, to be exact. 4 German figures, if you want to be particular. And if you want the whole story - the 4 Germans had overslept after having a little too much to drink the night before, and hadn't woken up till past ten! They'd bypassed Herculaneum and come straight to Vesuvius instead.




We took the train to Pompeii next, where I forgot to listen to 'Pompeii' by Bastille, but instead listened to a man playing an accordion in the carriage. Pompeii was much bigger than the Herculaneum, and by then we were sun sapped. But we kept going, stopping often to look at her beautiful mosaics and frescoes, and the breath-taking theatre, where we heard a group of Latin students practicing their Latin. We also stumbled upon what must have been the cemetery outside the old city walls, and I thought how strange for Romans to fear death so much they wanted to separate the dead from the living, when all the time they were living under the shadow of the mountain that would one day turn the entire city into a cemetery. And then I thought how presumptuous of me to think it was just the Romans that were ignorant of mortality, when really, the whole earth is one big cemetery and also one big cradle.

We who were living are now dying. With a little patience. 



It was a long train ride back to Naples, and oddly we met the Germans at the station when we got back! I spoke briefly to Michele and discovered that his cheek scars are from an accident involving a bicycle and a fence and a field of cows.



Nat and I had Gino's pizza for dinner, and ate it while Michele played a Traci Chapman song on his guitar.

In our room, a girl did a headstand and explained how breathing through your right nostril increases excitement while breathing through your left nostril increases calm.

Nat as still hungry so we went for some cereal, and met Lajoc, who launched into a lament about how he had arrived at the Herculaneum, and spent 3 hours there (we had spent just an hour and a half) and in consequence had missed his bus and didn't manage to get to Vesuvius as he'd hoped! Nat and I felt terribly cruel, but Lajoc is such a cartoon that we couldn't help laughing.