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Happy New Year to all of you!! We hope you had a good holiday season and that "whoever brings presents to you" brought you plenty of presents and cool stuff. This holiday season we decided to embark
on one of our usual exhausting, but fun, trips around Italy. We headed back south to visit Napoli, Pompei and Capri. Ten days of rain, pizza and 3 new extra purses for Annmarie (you know she who *does not like* purses). Anyway, here
we go.
Let's start with a couple of thoughts on Naples. Interesting city, very chaotic, good pizza, small alleyways and people who absolutely go ga-ga over nativity scenes. Napoli is reknown for its nativity scenes which come out at Christmas and there are many nativity scene "clubs" that present their works in competitions. If you are interested in participating yourself just head to Vicolo Armeno where you can purchase just about everything you want at just about any price. And of course it would not be Napoli without a Pulcinella in the scene. Each Italian city has a character (called "masks" in Italy) which represent the city in the carnival. For Napoli it is Pulcinella, all white with a black mask.
The old part of Naples is pretty interesting and its fun to just walk around in. The alleywas are tiny and most of the buildings were built in the 1700s and 1800s. Many of them still bear mark of old coats of arms and internal patios with arched arcades. Needless to say it is pretty chaotic today and somewhat dirty (or maybe we should say "colorful"). There seems to be a pizzeria around every corner and even in the rain, Napoletani wait for their slice of heaven.
It wouldn't be Napoli without the Vesuvius of course. An active, "explosive", volcano that errupted last in the 1940s (you can still see the solidifed lava flows). We headed up to about 3000 feet (there is a road) where you could, if it was open, then hike up to the crater. Unfortunately the weather did not cooperate. When we got to the start to the trail head it was actually *snowing* and the temperature had dropped quite substantially. We had to settle and take a picture of Napoli from up high on Vesuvius. we think its pretty impressive that you would build such a large city at the base of a volcano that has wiped out a city about 30 km south of where you are. But you could make the same argument for San Franciso and earthquakes or Miami and hurricanes.
You may wonder what Vesuvius looks like, well when we were in Capri we had the opportunity to view the volcano from the other side of the bay. We think this is about as "volcanic" as a mountain can get, and we were even lucky enough to get a bit of snow to make it look even more picturesque.
Speaking of Vesuvious, let's talk about Pompei. This city was completey wiped out around 70AD by a major eruption and completely covered by volcanic ash. Many of the inhabitants were caught in the town and could not escape, so there are some bodies that were calcified and represent what the person was doing right before he or she died. There are 4 bodies that you can actually see and they are somewhat disturbing. We took a picture of one and its interesting how it looks like he was trying to shield himself from something right before he died.
Perhaps the only good thing that came out of the eruption was that many of the buildings were kept intact. Pompei is a city, not a scattered group of ruins. It has roads, alleyways, two thermal baths, many villas, stores and in some places you can still see decorations in the buildings. The houses were particularly interesting. You walk into a central courtyard that has bedrooms on the side and on the far wall a room for receptions (picture on the left). The back of the house normally had a garden and the kitchen. One particular house had a small fountain completely intact (picture on the right).
Visiting Pompei is very interesting. Basically you just walk through this ancient Roman city. There are many buildings and details that are still intact and its quite amazing to see them. We hope that some of the pictures below can convey this feeling. In case you are wondering what the last picture is, it is a fully preserved "cold bath" at the central thermal baths. Basically a fully preserved giant marble bathtub.
Well, that is pretty much it for the mainland, we have another webpage for Capri, so click here to view it. Back to the main page | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
