Napoli is a dirty, chaotic, medieval city fashioned of black stone. It was quite a contrast from Roma. The crazy traffic and street culture immediately reminded us of Asia. The instant we arrived we loved it. People’s dress is creative and casual. Everyone was lazy and easygoing.

Cars and motorcycles whiz along the narrow pre-christian streets within inches of pedestrians. To cross a street, you just gather up some chutzpah and walk. If you aggressively jaywalked in an ordered city with lights and crosswalks, you’d get creamed in an instant. Here, all the drivers are paying attention. You’re responsible for your own well being and you have to be cognizant of your surroundings like everyone else. I really like the anarchic flow of Naples, and the personal responsibility it engenders. Still, you won’t find Italy on the Ten Safest Traffic Countries List any time soon.

Life in Napoli takes place out in the street. The rooms in the old buildings are very small and cramped, so you move your business stuff outside making the tight streets even narrower. You go inside mostly just to sleep. Dirty dogs roam the city in loose, mixed breed packs. Like in Asia, the dogs and cats are not prisoners or slaves, so they’re intelligent and haven’t gone barking mad. Their begging can be little distracting when you’re at a nice cafe, though.

Napoli is built upon, around and through the old Roman ruins. In one part of the city you can see the white marble of a Roman theater poking through and providing structural support for a whole block of black stone shops and apartments, with modern wooden construction atop that. The main drag is barely wide enough to accommodate cars and has been a market street for over two thousand years. During the last world war Napoli was badly damaged, but there were no civillian casualties because 20,000 people hid down in the old Roman aqueducts. We grabbed candles and a guide and descended 20 meters under the city to these cavernous catacombs. The Roman aqueducts were colossal pieces of stonework for moving massive amounts of water. You could drive several buses through them. The desperate graffiti from the war refugees is still down there.

Pizza was invented in the south and the greatest pizza in the world is still made there. The two best pizzas (in my opinion) are the simplest. Pizza Marinara is soft delicious dough, lightly spooned with a magical tomato sauce, sometimes dusted with a hint of fresh oregano. Pizza Margherita is dough, sauce, a handful of mozzarella cheese and one or two fresh basil leaves placed near the center. In the USA pizza seems to be an excuse to eat cheese and toppings. In fact, pizza is a heavenly preparation of three to four delicately balanced traditional ingredients.

Vesuvius towers over Napoli, and on the other side of it is the volcanically preserved city of Pompeii. A whole Roman era city is right there and you can walk through it! The roads still have cart grooves, the houses have gardens and kitchens. Its fascinating to see how the way people lived so long ago is so similar to how we do it today. Some people had tasteful frescoes painted in their living rooms, some people had tacky shite. The floor mosaic work is all still there. You can walk into old shops and restaurants with counters for customers and cupboards for dishes. It looks like the people left thirty years ago, not thousands. They had a public garden and swimming pool. They had two theaters: a big one for popular blockbusters, and a small one for the interesting shows. Near the gladiator barracks was a small arena, I really wished my friends were there (hi guys!) so we could throw down. There were also some freaky corpse casts of the poor bastards who couldn’t get out when the ash fell.

The visible sophistication of the Roman Empire’s hammers home the idea that we might’ve had people on the moon in 1065 AD if it hadn’t all gone to hell.

We wished we had a couple more days in Napoli. But we already had tickest, so we stuffed ourselves silly with pizza and flew our bloated bellies to London…

Rome is a big city that’s a lot like other modern cities except it has great historic rubble scattered throughout it. Everywhere you go you bump into some two thousand year old wall or temple. We had the misfortune to arrive the weekend of Teresa’s beatification so Rome was packed with the world’s faithful. The hostels were filled with True Believers, mostly Americans. We ran around and saw sights and tried to avoid crowds.

The Vatican City is a very strange place. All throughout Europe we went to the remains of castles and saw the relics of the monarchies. The Catholic Church is the last surviving medieval institution and the Vatican City is a fully functional, meticulously groomed, real deal palace. The amount of money the church has is on full display. The guards carry pikes and wear these ridiculous clown outfits. Everyone’s in clerical costume. Its a 24×7 ren faire.

Saint Peter’s Basilica is a gigantic and ostentatiously decorated building, that tries for conversion by awe. Michelangelo and others did a fine job with the plentiful and enormous statuary. There are mosaics inside made with such small tiles and fine gradations of color that you cannot tell they aren’t paintings without getting within inches. And its free!

To see the Sistine Chapel you are forced to wind through the Vatican Museum. This is good, because the museum is one of the best in Europe. The ancient Jordan river area stuff is of high quality and there are giant tapestries so detailed the method of making them has been forever lost. What takes the cake is the map room. A half kilometer long vaulted hall of beautifully painted, 15 foot high maps of Europe and Italy. As you walk down the corridor you easily imagine yourself as royalty talking to ministers and generals about what to build where and who to obliterate when.

At the Colleseum its easy to imagine the jeering crowd and pompous senators. The maze of mechanisms and cages beneath the arena is exposed and very sophisticated. We also went to see what remains of the Forum and Senators’ estates. There’s tons of good history in all those places, and it all smells like the ubiquitous mint plants. On top of one hill, Nero built himself a nymphaeum bigger than a football feild. Mandy and I immediately wondered why we haven’t done the same thing.

After seeing the sights, Roma kind of bored us as very generic modern city, I’m sure its a fine place to live and get to know. So we took the long train ride south…

As we traveled from the coast into Tuscany, the trees sprouted thin trunks and tiny tufted tops. The little alps of central Italy sprung up around the postcard villages and vineyards. Looking out the train windows, Mandy noticed that Italy is all agriculture, with little wilderness.

Florence, for some reason, is crawling with stray cats. Someone built a bunch of cat houses (No, no, that was Amsterdam) along the steps to Piazza del Michelangelo and little old ladies show up to feed them. We camped at the Piazza del Michelangelo on a big hill overlooking the city center. The city is gorgeous from above and filled with the competitive renaissance architecture. In the morning we walked down broad stone steps past scores of kittens. At the bottom was a little cafe on Niccolo St. where we had scrumptious cappucini and pannini.

Florence is bleeding sculpture out every pore. There is a statue garden in the piazza just north of Musea Uffizi that will knock you dead. “Rape of the Sabines”, “Rape of Persephone”, and “Herakles Beats the Snot out of the Centaur ‘Cuz He Looked at His Woman” are the most dynamic statues I have ever seen. Even though the people are 10 feet tall, the statuary honestly looks like it might leap off the pedestal at any moment. I kept checking to see if they were breathing. The sweeping lines of the action, incredible realism and elegant composition fascinated us. We routed every walk we could through this piazza so we could take another look.

It was good to see a bunch of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Donatello’s works up close. The Ninja Turtles picked up after a millennium where the Romans had left off. Donatello’s thin vertical sculptures have very still, grounded mannerisms. Its quite a contrast from Michelangelo’s muscles and movement. Mike’s David is being held hostage for 15 euros a peek in the tiny gallery d’Academe with only a couple other unfinished statuary. The disproportionate hands and head do cool perspective tricks as you approach him from an angle.

The women in Florence dress in a variety of flamboyant and varied ways similar to what I thought I might see in Paris. The leather they wear is crafted very creatively and they all wore high top boxing shoes.

Our camera broke again! So we got very few photos of Florence, and none thereafter. Overwhelmed by art, we scuttled on down to the seat of the old empire…

We took a train over to the Cinque Terra area on the west coast of Italy. Luckily for us, we got caught in a train workers strike. There’s always a strike somewhere in Italy. So we got trapped in this little town away from where we wanted to be. We spent a night in a bed and breakfast and then two days camping and it was great. It was a real little Italian town. Before this we had mostly just been to big cities and I was relieved to find the same Italian and European culture alive on a smaller scale.

The funny thing about Italy is that everyone is a small business. Ninety percent of Italian businesses are under 100 employees. In this little town there were scores of small Pizzerias, Gelaterias, photo studios, and barbers. This is a little deceptive. Every little business actually has a network of tight relations with several others. Once you enter into one node of the network they make it very very easy to stay and do business with only their friends. Larger businesses exist, but often disguise themselves as distributed small “families” for tax and PR reasons. This sort of business culture and the endemic Italian disregard for the law, lends itself quite naturally to secretive organizations that don’t play by the rules. Sicily, of course, has been the most successful at exporting this Italian specialty to the United States.

The food in Italy follows very traditional lines. They figured out what “the best” dishes were ages ago and have not messed with it. You’re not gonna find Hawaiian pizza here. We had dinner in the town of La Spezia one night and this really cute waiter politely signed to us that he was totally changing our food and our vino because what we had chosen was unsuitable. The meal he came up with was excellent, but to test a theory, we had a chianti the next night with fish. While we were allowed to have it, many people in the trattoria did indeed stare quizzically at our table throughout the whole meal.

The Cinque Terra area itself is gorgeous. The area feels a bit like the American southwest with the light brown soil, yucca and red terra cotta roofs. All the Italian cooking herbs grow to giant size around here like weeds. The tiny towns themselves are filled with tourists. Hobbling among them you can see the tough, gnarled old men who carved these coastal villages out of solid rock with their hands, breaking their bodies so their children could one day… sell kitsch to Germans.

You can take the train to all the towns in this region, but we felt spry and hiked over the mountains. As we climbed up over the rocky ground weaving through the olive groves the air was filled with the scent of rosemary, thyme, lemon, lavender, the crumbly earth and spray from the sea. Later we descended from the exhilarating views to go swimming in the Mediterranean. Its such a lovely climate.

Some more pictures.

Next we conquer Florence!

We came in to Italy via beautiful olive and wine country with the snowy Alps walling off the horizon. The golds and greens with red tiled roofs were all so perfect, nothing in the distance looked real. We got off the train and took a vaporetto (taxi boat) into Venice.

The nicest thing about Venice is that there are no cars. The city is entirely medieval. Because there’s no extra space like in a landed city there’s no modern belt. The streets and bridges wind around the hundreds of islands in a tight labyrinth. The stone walls are punctuated with little virgin Mary grottoes and doors with knobs in the center. The narrow corridors hem you in and prevent you from seeing where you’re going. Our path often ended a narrow alley with stairs descending into a canal. Like Prague, it can make you forget what century you’re living in.

Venice has a lot of finely crafted glass work. I’ve never seen glass twisted into such nice things. But the city is largely a museum of another age. The big highlight for us, was finally being introduced to Italian food culture:

Italians start off their morning by cruising by a little stand up bar. They walk in, slug down two shots of espresso and walk out. Maybe they munch a small pastry on their feet. Being a large Americano, I preferred the “tradesman’s breakfast” which is a little heartier. The price of everything on the menu more than doubles if you take a seat.

Pulling and serving cappuccino is a complicated, laborious process and the Italians drink a *lot* of cafe. The barristi are so fast and precise they can pull cafe for ten customers at once. The cappuccino in Venice was so good it made me want to fall down.

Lunch is a longer meal. Sometimes its a stand up panino covered in lovely herbs and vegetables drizzled in olive oil between focaccia. Another common lunch is just a bowl of nuts and a bowl of olives. These are both wonderful choices if you somehow manage not to go into the hundreds of pizzerias. Wash it down with a glass or two of vino and you’re ready for siesta. Then back to work at 3…or whenever.

Supper begins about 7 or 8 in the evening. Before that you’d swing by a wine bar for a fifty cent glass of aperitif. You hang out, chat and maybe find some dining companions. We mostly drank wine for aperitif, but one night we tried “Spritz”, a Venetian concoction. It has a mild orange, nutty flavor and is quite good. Supper itself is ordered and served in 3 small courses. Appertivo, Primi Pattati, and Segundo Pattati. Desert and digestifs are also served, but (we were told) are imported French customs.

Venice invented tiramisu, and there its made incomparably. We started to cry when ours was almost over. We found that good gelati whips up in its container like a baked Alaska.

In The States I find it ridiculously easy to choose a wine that’s just not drinkable. In Italy, the cheap wine at the grocer is very good. It really made us regret not trying the wine in France.

We felt much more inspired to take snapshots here.

Having breezed through the canals, we jumped on a train for the west coast to see what we could see…

Coming into Hungary someone tried to steal our bags again. Its just routine in eastern Europe. Someone walks into your train car while you’re asleep and scans your stuff. Our stuff was all secured to us, so it wasn’t really an issue. You notice them and they leave. One guy lamely asked for a light as he left the compartment.

We had overheard numerous travelers raving about what a good time they had in Budapest. Thinking back, we never heard *specifically* what it was they liked about Buda or Pest. We could never figure it out.

Budapest sucked. Its a big sprawling modern dirty city with utilitarian cement boxes for buildings. Everyone in Budapest scowls. Goulash is very uninteresting. Magyar is an incomprehensible language from the Uro-Finnish branch, completely unrelated to Indo-European. All the women, young and old, dress like hookers. There are steep fines for screwing up on the public transit system, which we did repeatedly.

The only thing to do in Budapest is go caving and go to the Turkish baths. The baths were not the blue-white hot springs of Iceland filled with young social travelers. They were dodgy pools of tepid water for basking old Magyars with deep frowns and deeper speedo overhang. We didn’t go caving either.

We did meet a jolly giant German there. A liter of beer in his hand looked like a pint in mine. He seemed to be having a good time. Maybe we screwed up and did Hungary all wrong. Maybe its a wonderful place and we just couldn’t figure it out. I’ll never know. Hateful city.

We have no pictures for you from Budapest. Anyway, on to a better place…

There’s this ossuary in the town of Kutna Hora, an hour outside of Praha. Someone sprinkled some earth from Galalie over the ground of this cemetery, so every moneyed person from all over Bohemia started planting themselves there when they died. The cemetery eroded and overflowed so they moved the bones to this new ossuary. They told the crazy half blind monk in charge of the place to stack the bones.

He did a bit more than that.

A little sad to leave the republic we found ourselves in an extremely sketchy train car and got very little sleep on our way towards Budapest…

Coming into Prague was a roller-coaster of good and bad impressions for us. We came into the Czech Republic via train passing through some nice mountainous territory and seriously run down villages. The train station on the north side of Prague was still a communist era affair, very unmaintained. Mandy followed signs to the ladies room that ended in only a dark corner. While amusing from a commie-historical perspective, we wondered how long we’d stick around.

So we jumped on the metro, came up in the center of the city and were blown away. Nearly every building in the old city is a masterpiece done in the recursively obsessive gothic style. The detail and artistry put into every piece of brick and stone is jaw dropping. Terraces and archways are held up by the rippling muscles of the old gods and goddesses. The streets are twisty and narrow with cart grooves worn into the stone. Every neighborhood has its own unique multi-colored cobblestone pattern. Every hinge, fixture and window is a medieval iron-working contraption. The place makes you feel like you’ve gone back in time into some faery tale. Now we thought we might never leave. Then we got to the town square.

While some of the most magnificent architecture is clustered around the old town square, its a hellish tourist trap. Its just thick with them, there’s nothing else. The hawking of cheap trinkets and tourist only services is like the gift shop area in a major amusement park. Oh no, we thought. Prague is “ruined”. We wondered how long we could stand it.

But outside the very center the tourism died away rapidly. One thing we’ve learned traveling about is that the nastiest tourist sites are also the most concentrated and easiest to avoid. The “ugly” set of tourists go from the train station to the tourist trap and back in a very narrow corridor and never ever leave this artificial environment. Past the icky zone was a real city with real friendly people living in it that really grew on us.

We really had fun with the Czech language. This was the first language we had to deal with that had no significant relationship to English, but we found it easy to learn and fun to pronounce.

Mandy and I have been following this body weight based yoga-eque exercise routine. We usually try to do this in secluded places, but often a corner of a public park has a handy tree branch for pull ups. We were going through these antics one morning in a park when a group of elementary school kids noticed us. They crowded around and started mimicking our routine. We stopped, but they complained, so we led them through it. Then we all traded stupid human tricks, feats of eight year old strength, and language tips.

Czech food is generally salty. They’ve got a breakfast cheese that will change your entire body’s Ph with the first bite. They also really like to put whipped cream on chicken. You can’t stop them, sometimes ice cream. I had a lovely fillet mignon with black pepper ice cream. The beer is really good too. Not quite as nice as Germany, but the quality is still there. Tmave Pivo is this delicious heavy dark beer that doesn’t taste at all like its 13%. The Absinthe is a tricky thing. If you drink to much of it you don’t feel drunk. You are, there’s no doubt about that. Coordination is off, etc, but you feel completely lucid. Great for conversation, potentially not so great in the long term if you believe the rumors about Thujone, Van Gogh and absinthism.

We found a little gnome to fix our camera for us, so as we left the city we took a couple of pictures. Our meager photographic skills and limited time do no justice whatsoever to what a fantastic spectacle Praha is. honest.

Outside of Prague we went to a little ossuary called Sedlec…

The reason I started traveling was to learn about different ways of living. I went to Europe to go to the grocer, drink at cafes, navigate across the cities and use the light-switches. Going to museums and monuments was just as much a way for us to turn the doorknobs as anything else. A buddy of ours went to Europe a few years ago, and when he came back he said,

“They’ve got us beat.”
“Whaddaya mean? How?”
“They live better. They’ve got us beat.”

In many ways, I’m now inclined to agree with him.

The old medieval city centers were built for people and are just a joy to walk around. Not only are they beautiful, but everything is person-scale, not car scale. Even in the larger cities, bike lanes and walkways are given just as much precedence as roadways. There are public recycling and rubbish bins on most city corners, so everyone uses them. You never have to duck into a *$ to use the toilet, but you might need a coin for the public one. The cities seem built for you, not just retail corporations and delivery trucks.

You can go anywhere in the continent by train. The auto and oil companies have not bought up the railways and torn up the track. Gasoline is not subsidized, in fact its taxed pretty heavily because it fucks up the air. People usually don’t drive cars that are bigger than they need. SmartCars are just two seats and a trunk, and they can cruise on the highway. Lots of people bicycle or drive rain-shielded scooters along the ubiquitous bike lanes.

European plumbing cracks me up. Like the electricity, a lot of it was installed hundreds of years after the original building was built. Every sink and toilet seems like a custom job. You walk in, you do your business, and then you play a puzzle game with anything that looks like it could flush or turn on the water. Sometimes you push, sometimes you pull, twist or yank. Sometimes its a foot activated button on the floor. Toilets have a “stop flush” button, so you don’t waste water on little jobs.

The food is fresh and real. Its never seen a preservative. When it goes bad it gets thrown out (‘cept the cheese! Whew!). I cannot emphasize how much of a difference real food, made in a local traditional style makes. If you order pizza, its made with dough that was baked this morning, not trucked in on a freezer from some factory loaded with “tasteless” carcinogenic preservatives. If you want yogurt, you go get it from a fromagier and its been made recently with fresh milk. Its divine. “Whole Food” or “Organic Food” is not a radical new trend for health conscious yuppies. Real food was never wiped out by factory made, carcinogenic, trans-fatty crap. Portion size in the store or the restaurant are not Glutton-Sized. As such, coming from the US they all look miniature.

So I’m pretty fascinated with Europe. Some of it fits me a lot better than the The States, some of it doesn’t. The US has many advantages, but it strikes me as Sparta to Europe’s Athens. Not in a warlike sense (ha!), but an economic and cultural one. Everything in the US is bare utilitarian, and dollar/marketing rather than quality of life motivated. Europeans appreciate style and taste in a way that I’ve always wished the USA with all its resources would. The public infrastructure and conservationism makes the USA look pathetic. When you tell Europeans about a 40 hour work week and less than 5 weeks of vacation they laugh until their sides hurt (“Its the 21st century! What about your life?”). But I’ve never payed European taxes, dealt with their restrictive speech laws or over-empowered police. The cultural traditions that gave me so much good food and pretty buildings might be really stifling if you grew up there. Guess I’ll have to go back and do more research (read “eat and drink”).