The ice cream, that is. Growing up, “neapolitan ice cream” was a thing. Maybe it still is? Three stripes of mediocre ice cream: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. I feel like it was actually the classy option back then, but if you were in my house what it meant was that after a few days there’d be a 2/3rds-empty carton and a stripe of pink. As that strawberry-averse youth, I had figured that this was somehow known to be the favorite desert of Napoleon Bonaparte. Look. You should be impressed that at that age I could piece together something so clever and so wrong at the same time (a skill I have since honed to a razor’s edge). Maybe not. Anyway, it was much later in life that I even put together that Neapolitan was what you called somebody from Naples, and by that time I had also learned that a country famous for gelato would not knowingly put their name on…. whatever that tri-colored stuff was. So yeah, ice cream-related desert in Naples is way better than I was led to believe. Naples itself? Like the ice cream, it’s got layers. And like the ice cream, a third of it (at least) is kinda gross.

Yeah, if any Neapolitans come across this blog from some wayward google search, mi dispiace. Then again, nothing we post here is likely to surprise you. But let’s back up a sec, we left off in Pompei. After two days of exploring the archaeological park, we had a travel day to get in position for a day trip to Florence. That meant packing ourselves up and checking out from our cute little place and hopping in our rental. Simple plan, really. We would drive into Naples, park the car and have lunch at a lovely place Lisa found down on the water. Then I drive her to the new AirBnB, drop the car back at the airport, cab it back to her and we finish off the night with a walk to dinner. Nice, right?

It all started well enough. We drove into Naples on a major highway, and took nice big arterial roads to the port area. There was a giggly moment where a guy on a scooter, driving in the far left lane, came to a dead stop and unslung a camera to take pictures. In the road. And when other motorists expressed their displeasure avec car horns, he flipped them off. So yeah, Naples. Still, the traffic was mostly just typical Italian city traffic as we had experienced in past trips. Cool. (How’s my foreshadowing? Getting better? Worse?) We park easily enough and have a lovely stroll along the waterside to the restaurant, which was as charming as advertised. (Reviews will be coming along, we’re in the middle of a busy time right now.) Then the fun, by which I mean dystopian hellscape, began.

Most European cities I’ve had the pleasure to visit share a common aesthetic when it comes to re-zoning for modernization. Basically, they don’t. Roads that handled people and carts are certainly allowed to have cars on them, but they’re not going to knock down any buildings to make room. So. If it’s a major capital like Paris, at least the main avenues are probably useful since they’d been built for lots of traffic even back then. But fancy city or not, a lot of roads are twisty-turny and can be difficult to navigate. Then, you take a city that grew up on a rocky cliff side and was probably renowned for being an insane rabbit warren 400 years ago and put cars on those streets and you begin to see the problem. Now, imagine that anybody who walks those hills and has enough money realizes that they probably wants nimble motorized transport to get around. Naples is a city of more than 2 million people (metric). Starting to get the picture? There’s a couple hundred thousand scooters flinging themselves around those same narrow switchbacks, clearly in the midst of trying to decide if life is still worth living.

Oh, and there was a garbage collection strike going on.

So, maybe our opinion of Naples has been formed at an unfair time, but it was definitely a mixed affair. I dropped Lisa off (did we say this is mostly a John post this time? Lisa is traveling again. More on that in a week or two, I imagine…) and went to the airport. It was about 4km as the crow flies; it took me 45 minutes and 23 new gray hairs to get there. (Lisa, meanwhile, thought I was just looking for a place to park and stood outside waiting for me. We’re still married; that’s how forgiving she is.) We are finally reunited and make it out to dinner, where we visited a classic Italian piazza scene, with cafes, families strolling, children playing with their dogs, piles of garbage and constantly swarming scooters… ok, not like every Italian piazza. In any case, after dinner we walked a few hundred meters away (and a few hundred meters UP) to our home for the day. We needed our beauty rest, ’cause we had a busy, busy day coming up.

All joking aside, Pompeii is a magnificent place to spend serious time. On this visit, we went twice . . . and will return (several times) again. If you plan your day carefully, pack a picnic lunch, and are in good physical shape you might be able to see everything in the 163 acres that makes up the ruins. But more is being excavated daily, making your assertion that you “saw everything” meaningless in a year.

Our tactic is to just go for a visit every five years or so, to see what’s new. This visit, for example, gave us the newly-opened Casa del Criptiportico, notable for its two levels to be explored. There are (children’s?) etchings in a wall and a magnificent fresco depicting Mercury and a multicolored snake, sacred to the people of Pompeii.

Also worth a special visit is the Casa del Menandro. This home is not named after a noble of that name but a fresco of the Greek playwright Menandro who was a favorite of the mistress of the house*. The residence also features a lovely central garden area with interior walls painted with stylized flowers. A room off of the garden has four pillars and a tiled area. (This picture is my absolute favorite of all taken at Pompeii. It captures so much of what we love about this place.)

Here are a few more images to pique your interest:

From Pompeii we went to Naples, and the contrast was striking. Pompei (the city, not the ruins) is utterly Italian — bold, bright, delicious, and a little brash. Naples is loud, aggressive, rude, and thinks brash is for weaklings. Just driving in to get to our lunch place ratcheted blood pressure and made our heads pound. (It was also very dirty as a garbage strike was in process.) Individuals are, as always, quite lovely and helpful.

While we didn’t do it this trip (ran out of time), the Naples Archeological Museum is a necessary visit to fully appreciate the glory of Pompeii (and Ercolano and elsewhere) — it’s where all the good stuff is kept. When Pompeii was first discovered Naples was still an independent city-state, and the ruler there happily plundered the place to enrich and glorify his rule. (John once heard somewhere refer to it as treating Pompeii as an “art mine”, and while it sounds weird it actually works really well.) Here you will find the originals of the bronzes found, and many of the frescoes and mosaics. These pictures are from our first visit.

We finished the day with a meal on a characteristic piazza, some old building having been converted to a hub for cafes. Children ran around the place with their dogs, friends met up for a drink, and life generally rolled by amiably. We nibbled our pizza and a surprisingly-good eggplant parmesan, then settled down for a long summer’s nap. Tomorrow, we have a late addition to the itinerary – a day trip to Florence (which sounds bonkers on its own) for a once-in-a-generation exhibition.

*- a note about the stories in Pompeii, and about the place in general. The Italian sensibility regarding authenticity is more… flexible than some (including us) might like. They will proudly put a spotlight on a magnificent mosaic, and only careful reading (or a visit to the right museum) will reveal that the actual mosaic was long since removed and a replica is in its place. You might be amazed at how well a floor has held up only to find out that it didn’t really, but was carefully restored. Likewise, the stories you are told about Pompeii may be based on documents or inscriptions found on site, but they may also be “reasonable assumptions” based on the evidence, with no distinction made between the two. We suggest you just relax about it or you’ll go crazy.