Napoli Napoli
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…