Day 12: Naples

I woke up feeling much better. And I woke pretty late, too, 7:30 AM (considering I had gone to bed before 9:00 PM, that was a long sleep). With no plans today, we could afford to be a bit more leisurely. We got breakfast items at a nearby grocery store and pastry shop, and ate them back at the apartment.

Our apartment entryway is smaller than it looks.

We decided not to go to Capri or any other day-trip adventures after all. While they sounded nice, we wanted to avoid the hassle and expense of extra planning. Today the itinerary would be to do the walking tour of Naples. And a long walking tour it was: with over 90 minutes of audio, we were in for a long walk. We made sure to have the audio guide downloaded on each of our phones so we wouldn’t have to share a headset.

Ruins in the middle of the city

Specialty pastries of Naples

The tour took us from the archeological museum to all corners of central Naples. It included a gallery mall, a student district with bookstores, a rare quiet park where you can’t hear much of the usual hubbub, a fish market, several churches, and the most well-known pedestrian drag: Spacca Napoli. Of the churches, we liked the one with the waffle-iron exterior the most (Gesu Nuovo Church). It was sited next to a plague column, the only one we saw on the trip.

The Spacca Napoli is kind of a crazy street. It is packed, and it is narrow. There’s all kinds of stores lining it. One particular street is filled with vendors selling decorations and novelty items, including a lot of Christmas decorations. Liz bought a nativity for her mom that was charming and delightful. An Italian nativity is a smaller scale than a typical American one, and tends to be more tall than wide. The one we bought had some fun Italian touches to it, including a pizza chef on the back.

Very large-scale example of an Italian nativity

The vendors on this street also sell figurines. There’s many varieties, but sports figures tend to be the most popular. Diego Maradona is the most common among them (more on him later). My personal favorite was the one of Luis Suarez biting an Italian player in the 2014 world cup. There’s also political figures, musicians, some Italians I don’t recognize, and various other pop culture icons.

You can be a major international footballer for years, but if you bite one guy...

Maradona is worshipped here like a god. No, seriously: I saw some memorabilia featuring his face and the word “dios.” There’s also a bar that includes a shrine to Maradona with a lock of his hair. You can’t take a picture without buying something in the bar, so I didn’t. Personally, I think Messi is better, but Messi never played for SSC Napoli.

We tried a pastry on the tour but to our dismay, it was soaked in alcohol. I couldn’t get past two bites. On the other hand, we got more pizza from the other famous pizzeria in Naples: this time Liz got one with egg, and I got one with salami. They were still margherita, just with additional ingredients. They were yummy, and I have to say the pizza in Naples was by far the best on the whole trip.

Pizza dough nativities

After taking a break in the apartment, we decided to go to the archeological museum. It had quite an impressive collection of artifacts from Pompeii and Herculaneum. It included statues, mosaics, a scale model of ancient Pompeii, and much more. We were dismayed by some of the closures and missing items, though: the battle of Alexander mosaic was undergoing restoration (we saw a copy in Pompeii), as was the dancing faun. Venus of the Perfect Buttocks was on loan to the Kunsthistorischemuseum in Vienna, and the erotic art wing and Egyptian wing were both closed off. Still worth the visit, though.

Alas, no Venus of the Perfect Buttocks

We were not hungry enough for dinner, but we decided to get one last gelato on the Spacca Napoli. On the way, we picked up a cookbook for Dale in the student district. I decided to just stick with the classics: straciatella and hazelnut. Liz got ricotta pear and some mix of pistachio with other spices. She raved about the ricotta pear gelato.

We returned to the apartment and got ready to depart the next day. We finished our leftover pizza from Pizzeria da Michele, and called it a trip.

Observations:

• Neapolitans don’t like to finish their pizza crusts. We were surprised to see plates with crusts piled on it like the remains of chicken wings. Sure, the crusts are a bit burned, but they’re still good food.