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…