August 4, 2004
NAPOLI -- Naples is infamous the world over for its insane traffic. It deserves its reputation. It's not that the drives are bad -- in fact I think they must all be quite skilled, just to survive here -- but that there is an enormous number of cars, bicycles, and pedestrians all trying to share the same insufficiently large slice of pavement at the same time. Once you get into the flow, it all works miraculously well, like a delicate and complicated dance coreographed with the aid of car horns and the occasional rude gesture. Most impressive to me was the driving in the Spanish Quarter, which is an incredibly dense grid of streets about ten inches wider than the average car. It's impossible to see around corners without entering intersections, so Neapolitan drivers give their horns a short warning honk each time they approach a cross street, which in this neighborhood is about every ten seconds. Naples is not what you would call a quiet city.
In fact, Naples is not what you would call clean, easy to navigate, or even particularly pretty to look at. The city gets a bad reputation as a dirty chaotic den of petty crime, and perhaps with some reason. I have only talked to one other person who came away from the city with a positive impression. Nevertheless, I did rather like the city -- if nothing else it's energetic.
I arrived at the train station in Naples with no clear idea where I would sleep, as usual for this trip. I had had a hostel recommended to me by two different people as excellent, but when I tried to contact them it seemed their number had changed, so I tried my luck just walking up. The hostel was full, but they directed me to a nearby hostel run by a man named Giovanni. I think Giovanni gets all his buisiness from this other hostel: in the three days I was there, every guest seemed to have been sent by them. But it was a nice enough place, with air conditioning in the rooms, and Giovanni is a very friendly guy. (He is actually less friendly to his male guests -- not rude, just not as warm. For his female guests he cooks lunch.)
The hostel is also well located, in the historical center of Naples, right down the street from one of the city's (and thus the world's) best pizzerias and a bustling food market. My first night there, I collected a small group of an American, a Canadian, and two Dutch girls to go to this pizzeria, Gino Sorbillo's, for dinner, and it was indeed very very good. (Giovanni also agreed that it was one of the best. He said that when he goes there, he gets two pizzas, one for dinner and one for breakfast.) It's hard to say just what makes the pizza better, but my fellow diners agreed that there is something special about the dough. Pizza in Italy is not really the same as in America. The main difference is that many Italian pizzas don't have any cheese. They usually, but not always, have some tomato sauce, but often not very much compared to American pizzas. While disappointing at first to cheese-lovers, these pizzas have the advantage of having fewer competing flavors, so you can taste all the ingredients. When the ingredients are top-notch, as at Gino's, the effect is quite excellent.
For my second day, I took a day trip to Pompeii, the famous fossilized Roman city. I don't know how everyone else pictured it, but the image I had of Pompeii was of some sleepy little mountainside village that was wiped off the map by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, only to be discovered thousands of years later as an archeological curiosity. This is not even remotely the case. Pompeii was quite large. I walked around its uncovered streets (and not all of it has yet been unearthed) for over three hours without seeing the whole city. Accurate numbers are hard to come by, but I´m told archeologists guess that the population was in the tens of thousands (not small for 79 A.D.) when the volcano erupted. And, as the reader will have heard before, everything is "well-preserved" -- meaning that large parts of most buildings, and all of a few, are still standing, with many mosaics and wall paintings still intact.
Among Pompeii's many ancient secrets was hidden a more contemporary one: it happpened that a fellow Swattie (C.) was working with an archeological in the city this summer (as well as the previous four summers in fact), and I just happened by walk by her dig site wearing my Swarthmore College t-shirt. This being only the second time I have randomly happened across a classmate in a foreign country, I decided to make the most of my luck and agreed to come back when C. was done with the day's work so we could go out for dinner. We eventually went with several of her dig friends to the seaside town of Castel del Mare, where we sat on the quay and ate cheap and plentiful seafood, flung beans at each other, and marveled at the bizarrely fizzy red table wine they have in southern Italy. A good time was had by all, and we managed not to miss the last train back toward Naples (apparently the dig crew is usually not very good at catching it). I arrived back in Naples too late to catch the subway back to the hostel, but the walk back from the station was only unnerving, not actually dangerous.
I began day three with a trip to the archeological museum in Naples, where many of the most important artifacts from Pompeii have been collected, as well as those not deemed "suitable" for family viewing -- the Romans had their naughty streak, you see. It was all impressive, but by this time I was low on energy and low on patience for museums, so I left after not so very long. In the afternoon I went to a random café for a very excellent cannoli and espresso, and then I took some advice from a fellow hosteller, and escaped the midday heat by taking a tour of the acqueducts underneath the city. They have quite an interesting history, beginning as simple holes left over from the stone mines used to build the Greek settlement of Neapolis. When the Romans moved it, they enlarged the structures to be a proper system of acqueducts and cisterns. The tunnels continued to be used in this way for centuries, but some enterprising souls also used them over time as secret passages for clandestine activities, cellars for storing wine and preserving vegetables, and as a guide for a city sewage system. Regrettably, the sewers were carved out of porous stone, and a massive cholera epidemic in the 1800's led the city to arrange a new water supply. During World War II, the now mostly dry tunnels were used as shelter during air raids. Now the tunnels are largely sealed off and used mostly for a tourist attraction, although a section of tunnels belonging to a Roman theater was "discovered" just four years ago underneath and behind an ordinary Neapolitan home. The owners had clearly known about it, since they had built around the tunnels and used some of the extra space, but they kept this knowledge to themselves. So who knows what other secrets the city may hide in its depths?