Naples 11 and 13 May

11 May Latte' e Liett' apartment directly opposite the ferry terminal in Naples (overlooking Via Cristofero Colombo)


If you're dieting, don't come to Italy and especially, don't come to Naples. You'll be seduced. But I'd better start at the beginning of the day.
We untied our rope at 8am after sleeping soundly on a calm sea, wheeled our bikes off (before the cars) hugged Heather and Leon goodbye and made our way to our apartment at the end of the ferry terminal.
We were met by the owner's mother, a dynamic and friendly ex-teacher who has just retired. She spent 30 mins giving us a run-down an all the best things to see in Naples, and then invited us to cycle a few kilometres along the harbour front with her. She was on her way home. After stowing our luggage in the little hallway outside the room, we set off. She began by carefully cycling the wrong way up a busy three lane thoroughfare, and we were thus initiated into Neapolitan road rules. She explained it wasn't safe to leave the bikes tied up, even with the massive lock we've been hauling around, because we'd find bits (brakes, gears, etc) missing off them when we returned. Armed with this knowledge we decided to use foot and bus in Naples and leave our bikes chained to a pipe in our building's downstairs lightwell/courtyard.

We rode home along Via Roma pedestrian street. In the Piazza del Plebiscite there was a fleet of about 25 police motorbikes standing ready, and police conferring in groups. Italians take uniforms seriously and wear them proudly. Supermarket staff, train staff, cafe staff, bus drivers. Police are no exception. Here, they wear black knee-length boots, and their navy blue tucked in trousers have a broad mauve stripe running down the outside. It looks pretty gorgeous. Less impressive to us, is the lolly-pop looking thing they use when directing traffic. It's about a foot long altogether – a white plastic stick with a red circle edged with white on the end. As we were nearing our apartment for our 1pm meeting with the owner, we saw a police chase by Guardia de Finanza (in charge of tax-evasion, drug smuggling and illegal immigrants etc) – two cars with sirens on, blowing whistles, and frantically waving lolly-pops out of the front passenger window went charging around a corner then lurched to a halt, leaving a mere inch between them and the car in front, stuck in traffic.

Neapolitan traffic is full-on – cars and motor bikes jostle for space, and we need our Vietnamese road crossing techniques to do as locals do on pedestrian crossings. If you are SURE the cars coming have seen you, you can step out and they'll swerve, charge ahead, deviate, slow slightly, or ….... if all else fails, as the only possible alternative to running you down …....admit defeat and stop.

The city is crawling with fantastic buildings and churches, housing priceless sculpture, frescoes and paintings. Piazza del Nilo has been called that for 2000 years, first named by the Egyptian immigrants who settled in that part of the city. Our landlord's mother, Lia, told us that in all the different housing sections of the city, “elegant” people live right against the very poor, and that squalid/gorgeous juxtaposition was right in front of us. A a church dripping with gold gilt, a fabulous obelisk in the centre of a piazza, and yet grungy graffiti to head-height down every laneway.

All that in a couple of hours of wandering Naples.

Our 'apartment', when we got into it, is actually a single room (with attached bathroom) beautifully decorated in light airy colours, with a lovely cupboard-kitchen, housing sink and cook-top and etc and a little table in the corner loaded with packaged cakes, biscuits and cornflakes for breakfast, “so you will have plenty of energy for the day ahead,” said our genial host. A large eight-glazed door/window gives us full view of the latest passenger liners and ferries to dock and our little balcony with table and chairs, but it's pretty noisy out there.

Having taken possession of the 4 keys needed to let ourselves into the building at night, and having practised locking and unlocking the outer door which houses three of these apartments under his watchful eye (“you must turn the key twice, and then a little more”), one of us did her washing (while the other had a little siesta) and then we uploaded the last section of our blog and tried to select a few pictures from so many contenders. (Many thanks to the notes from you our friends and family, wondering when the next installment is coming)


Our host had a printed list and map of his favourite, reasonably priced, restaurants, because he liked to eat and did not think the Lonely Planet (despite its many useful virtues) was very good at choosing restaurants. We picked the nearest two and went and had a look. One of them had bufala in the name, which was not the owner but the subject matter, so we went to the other one – Trattoria Medina. 2 rooms down, 4 rooms up, in an old building. Murals with pastoral scenes and sea views surrounded us as if we were on a terrace, with clouds and sky above up to the 7 m high wooden beamed ceiling, guitarist and mandolinist playing vaguely familiar songs, waiters in long aprons. The classic tourist restaurant except that it was packed and we were the only tourists. The waiter rattled off a series of suggestions to us in uncompromising Italian, so we said si, experimentally, except that we did not want meat. Another waiter took away our now redundant menus. What had we done?

An enormous bruschetta arrived with beautiful tomatoes on top – to tide us over. Then a plate full of tender, pressed octopus which must have been a monster of the deep when alive. A paper cone full of a range of deep fried morsels. A plate with three kinds of (I think) buffalo cheese – mozzarella, ricotta and smoked mozzarella, and some salad. We waded through this, our wine and then it occurred to us, with alarm, that there might be more coming. Our waiter came back and asked us, with a smile, what we wanted by way of primi piatti and secondi piatti to follow the antipasto. Fortunately, our expressions and gestures were able to persuade him that the antipasto plus, well, alright, shared profiteroles for dessert (might as well be hung for a sheep) - and a limoncello - would just suffice, grazie molto.

The bill was, of course, reasonable and our B & B, I am glad to say, downhill.


13 May Latte' e Liett' apartment directly opposite the ferry terminal in Naples (overlooking Via Cristofero Colombo)


Today we had an epic day of sightseeing. We saw fabulous statues in Chiesa di Sant' Anna dei Lombardi: a terracotta group and a madonna , and Vasari's famous frescoed ceiling – which had many more naked bosoms than you would have expected! Then we saw the best example of a Renaissance church in Naples, which is Chiesa del Gesu Nuovo. After that the beautiful cloisters of Santa Chiara, with decorated pillars in the middle and orange trees in fruit, and even a decorative veggie garden. Next, we walked through some fantastic old streets in Centro Storico full of ancient buildings and archways and busy with small shops and people going about their daily lives, to get to Pio Monte della Misericordia where a prized Caravaggio hangs, called the Seven Acts of Mercy. We'd started at 11am and it was now 2pm (we're on Naples time!) and we were starving, so we went looking for one of the most famous pizzeria's in Naples – Da Michele – and after another interesting walk we found a large group of people outside it, holding orange tickets. Luckily it turned out they were queuing for tables, so we bought an enormous take-away pizza for 5E . It was delicious. A Margherita. The piazza we were looking for didn't eventuate, so we ate it perched on a concrete planter in a main shopping street, and washed it down with two sweet and juicy blood oranges.

Ignoring the fact that it was siesta, we soldiered on, and went to the train station to check the lie of the land and buy tickets to Rome for tomorrow. That done, we decided to catch the Metro to Montesanto where the funicular to Vomero where the castle with a magnificent view and the cloisters of a once famous Charter House were. By dint of asking for help from two lots of people, we got up there, and yes, the view was fantastic, and the cloisters were striking – but more austere than the ones of the morning.

After coffee, tea and cakes we caught a bus back down to the funicular. We were getting pretty tired by this time, and planned to catch a bus home, but the streets were vibrant and intoxicating, not to say photogenic – so we decided to keep walking, and walked all the way back home.

By this time it was 7.30, and no-one eats before 8.30, so we had a cup of tea and a rest before setting out again to find another of Giancarlo's top ten restaurants.

This one was a hoot. The restaurant had spilled out of the building and taken over most of a street. The waiters were cheery and boisterous, making lots of noise, joking with their customers, and clapping the two newly qualified police who arrived in uniform with girlfriends on their arms. We got a table just as a queue of people wanting tables developed. As we ate, we watched in amazement as the crowd waiting kept on expanding. We thought there were about 50 people waiting when we left at 10pm, but the crowd was deeper than we could see from our table. We estimated between 90-100 people were hoping to eat there, though at what time they were going to get in we couldn't imagine.

Our meal by the way was lovely – Half a bottle of red wine, an Italian salad, gnocchi in tomato sauce, roasted eggplant and roasted capsicum, crispy fried little fish, and everyone in the restaurant got a section of pineapple for dessert. On the way out we started to explain what we'd had, and he just looked at Phil and said, “Make it 20E.” that's a little more than $30 Aust.

We walked home to two pieces of chocolate cake – a gift from our landlord Giancarlo, to his friends, and have managed to write this up for you, our loyal readers. The two cruise ships outside our balcony this morning have moved on , and tomorrow, sadly, so shall we.

14 May Camping Feniglia just outside Orbetello

Before moving on we had time to make one last walk – past Chiesa di Gesu Nuovo to the chapel of San Severo. We were very glad not to have missed this. It contained three wonderful sculptures – a Christ in burial veil which was technically astonishing but also a very beautifully realised and moving portrait of a young man resting in peaceful death after suffering, a rather erotic statue of a woman improbably titled chastity, and a remarkable rendering of a man partly caught in a net.

Then back to the B & B to pack and venture a little ride through Naples to the station. This was OK (by dint of using footpaths and our now finely tuned technique of pretending to be e.g. buses so that we could ride up the public transport lane against the direction of a one way street), though as traffic clogged up near Piazza Garibaldi, it was quicker to walk. The train was enormously long, with the bici area at the far-off front. The helpful conductor got us to take the panniers off and there was ample space for the bikes in the luggage room, and for the panniers on the racks. Not only that, he validated our tickets by hand because we head forgotten to, which was better than hitting us with a 100E fine.

The trip to Rome was not very exciting, but it was surprising how soon after the apparent outskirts we were at Termini Roma. Our friendly conductor watched the luggage for us as we got the bikes off. I went and found a ticket machine, validated the tickets and found the whereabouts of the next platform. Off we went. The station was enormous and very busy and crowded and busy with all the shops etc you would expect to find in an airport terminal.

[Phil is being modest. How he found his way around this huge station amazed me.]

Our next train (which went to Pisa) was again very long, with an even better luggage compartment and in better nick. Some English touring cyclists got off and told us they were escaping the three days of rain expected in the north. Where was this happening? Pisa. The luggage compartment had butchers' hooks for the bikes. Gail's was hung, mine did not fit. This conductor took the view that whatever suited us was OK.

Our train headed off through Rome, and, at one station, I looked up to see the dome of St Peter's about 200m away. None of the Romans took much notice of this.

As the train stopped in stations in Rome, more and more people got on, and many had to stand. Commuting to the North coast as far as Civitavecchia seemed the norm.

The train went past Fiumicino and the very station where we caught our fist train on the way to Sardinia. It was nice to be completing a circle, so to speak, halfway through our trip.

When we got off at Orbetello, the ground was damp and the sky very overcast, but rain didn't seem imminent. We had decided to take a hotel if it was raining. The conductor and a passenger (an innocent bystander, so to speak) insisted on lifting down our loaded bikes for us. The station, remarkably, had ramps (unlike, say, Catania, where the wheelchair signs pointed helpfully to the stairways). Being optimists,we decided to camp, went to a supermarket and then found the campground. As we cooked dinner, lightish rain started and we ate in the tent.

We felt a bit tired tonight after our rather hectic but wonderful time in Naples and a long day of travelling. We are looking forward to the weather clearing and to riding around Tuscany.