Naples

We woke up early the next morning and and went to one of Rome's archeology museums prior to our 10AM departure time to Naples. We had arranged for one nights stay and planned to see Pompeii and then make the 6 hour train ride to Siena. We ended up loving Naples and stayed for an additional two nights. On the train ride south we caught glimpses of the ancient Roman aqueducts that provided the running water supply for the Roman people and the fountains.

Our first stop was the National Archeological Museum which houses the most magnificent frescos and mosaics from both Pompeii and Herculaneum. Dozens of representative mosaics and red painted stucco walls were on display. It was actually nice for us to be able to see these mosaics up close because most of the wall mosaics in Pompeii are out of reach. A scaled model gave the first preview of the magnitude of the ruins of Pompeii. The model was made in the 1800's (they started excavating Pompeii in the 1700! Some of the murals and houses found in this model from the 1800s have already been lost. Up until seeing this model I had never realized the sheer magnitude of the ruins.




We ate pizza that night. Naples is the birthplace of pizza. With that in mind we searched for a pizza place that would best represent the Neapolitan pizza experience. All of our books pointed us toward Sorbillo's. The grandfather of the current owner of Sorbillo's pizza is said to have invented the calzone and has past his family secrets down through the generations. The restaurant was a quite four table operation with one server and about 10 diners, a mix of locals and tourists, at any given time. We were tired from training and walking all day, but the pizza was fantastic. There is nothing quite like hot wood-fired pizza in a city where it was actually invented. We would later learn that the true Sorbillo's was about 2 doors down. Who knows who the guy was who was running this one. We still came back the next night.

We had to leave our hotel - a room in a building from the 1400s where some of the rooms had the original frescos on the wall-because it was pricey and we only reserved the room for one night. So we checked into a hostel run by a Neopolitan guy who, perhaps because we were a bit older and less interested in partying, gave us an hour lecture about all of the wonderful sites in the city that we needed to see (he smoked about 2 packs of cigarettes during the lecture and meticulously used 6 different color highlighters to map out a rout for us around Naples). We then set off to do him proud. We also walked down to the waterfront to see Castel Nuovo and Palazzo Reale. This was the first of the palaces that we visited during our two week trip. It was everything you would expect from an ancient palace of Italian royalty. Filled with opulent decor, vaulted and painted ceilings, a beautiful garden in the back overlooking the Bay of Naples it did not disappoint.

On the way back to the hotel we stopped in to one of the oldest cafes in Naples for an espresso and sfogliatelle. Sfogliatelle is a Neapolitan pastry which consists of layers of crispy, flaky dough usually filled with sweetened ricotta cheese. It sounds pretty bad, but was actually quite good. A little shell shopping brought us back to the hotel.