Naples

After the jump: Naples!

I took a sleeper train up to Naples, and - as I believe I have mentioned in this space before - sleeper trains are magnificent. I was exceptionally lucky to be traveling in the final weeks of Italy's COVID protocols, under which the purchase of a sleeper ticket at any class got you a compartment to yourself (or your entire party if traveling with someone), handily slicing the cost to a minimum while allowing that glorious feeling of a compartment where you can stretch out and relax.

Unlike my sleeper trip to Krakow a few years back, or my "do I have tuberculosis?" sleeper train trip from Boston to Chicago my first year of grad school, the Palermo-Naples sleeper isn't quite long enough for those idyllic waking hours of watching the landscape unfold outside your window, but it was still terribly pleasant to settle in with a picnic dinner and a half-bottle of wine as we departed at sunset. The conductor stopped by with the "BUTTON OF EMERGENCY" and again with some disposable slippers and a toothbrush/paste/amenity kit. After that, it was just a pleasant dinner, a little work at my laptop as the dark countryside sped past, and then bed. I woke up in the middle of the night as the train car was loaded onto a ferry - oh, did I mention this train goes on a boat??? - and peeked outside my curtain before heading back for a little more slumber. In the morning, a little breakfast kit came to give me a little boost a half-hour before we arrived in Naples, and then I was off!

Candid photograph of yr humble author, Being Off

 Naples itself... well, I had a bit of a mixed experience. The energy of the city I loved quite a bit, and I still enjoyed the complex negotiations of navigating the city, but unquestionably Naples is more on the tourist circuit than any of the corners of Sicily that I'd visited, and if you turned onto the wrong street at the wrong time of day, you were swimming in a sea of slow-walkers and cruise ship passengers following color-coded flags while listening to their earpieces. I was on a (generally quite lovely!) food tour with at least one person whose mode of tourism was that most insufferable model of "let me loudly observe all the things I find disgusting or bad about the place I am visiting," which didn't particularly set a great tone.

This lion is also VERY tired of dealing with slow walking large groups of tourists!

It was also hot, which I know is a little absurd on the heels of my 100-degree days in Ragusa, but Naples is an incredibly un-green city, is less shade-and-breeze-structured than Palermo, and has more broad boulevards where the city has ceded ground to cars and accepted the blazing heat that results. I'm not a fan, but was usually able to just dodge into alleyways, or in the worst case scenario, retreat to my hostel room during the apex of the day's heat. ("Get out early, hide from early afternoon sun, get out in the evening again" is a pretty good rule of thumb in general for avoiding Mediterranean heat and crowds alike.) And finally... there was just not an awful lot of street art (though a lot of tagging graffiti) and not much that I personally found appealing, even compared to e.g. Bologna.

It must be conceded, however, that Bologna is coming up WAY short in the "umbrellas and walking sticks with octopi carved into them" department

But it was still charming enough that I do have Naples filed away in my "might be wonderful in March or November" Parisian-style brain-corner. The food was indeed magnificent - nobody is exaggerating about the powerfully excellent pizza - and there were a lot of corners where you could slip the crowds by heading up into the hills away from the city center. I got a great look into some beneath-the-surface culture, whether chatting with a fella whose bakery makes freselle (basically the precursor to crostini) from a sourdough starter that dates back to 1947 (the previous starter died during the war, no joke) or chatting in broken English/Italian with a woman who ran a beverage stand about the "spread your legs and gulp it down before it foams over" fizzing drink she made, having a gloriously delightful chat with a couple of young guys who wanted to talk about Chicago and how it compared to Naples, or just getting a sense of Neapolitans' complicated relationship to the rest of Italy.

The grand cafes of Naples are also extremely excellent, basically everything you want out of these spaces, and - as with everywhere in Italy - very affordable if you're willing to stand at the counter drinking your coffee while basking in the chandeliers and vintage furnishings and the energy of a place that's been there forever.

I didn't use Naples as a springboard into the Amalfi coast, Pompeii, or Capri, etc., much to the shock and dismay of my tour group companions ("It wasn't til my third trip to Paris that I went to the Louvre! I like taking things slowly!" I tried to explain. Well, one of them got it.) Which I think was the right call, given the brevity of my time there (four days and three nights isn't very long, and I've always regretted overpacking my schedule with "GO HERE DO THAT" agendas). The best advice I ever got about travel was "assume you will return," and I do think that I will - perhaps as part of an off-season visit, perhaps on a visit more devoted to the neighboring regions... but I'm glad I laid eyes on this dense, challenging, but kind of enticing city. We must, however, stick to our agreed-upon plan to ABOLISH TEMPERATURES.

Pretend this statue is a monument to the war against temperatures!