Week 13 - Italy
Well, once again we've experienced quite a contrast.
While we've done day and overnight trips to cities, this is the first time we've really stayed in one. We're not actually staying in Naples, but in Trecase, which is a suburb, however this whole area is very densely populated. 4,250,000 people are squeezed into the area between the mountains and the sea.
Here's our street, with Vesuvius ahead. Our villa has a garden with orange and lemon trees…
…but still a big change from our mountain in Spain.
My morning walk now consists of shopping, a few items each day and each from a different store, the bakery, the green grocer, the fishmonger etc.
I do enjoy shopping and cooking, but we're also eating out more than we have other places, because the food is absolutely amazing.
The noise and bustle overwhelmed us all at first, but we're getting accustomed to it. The first several times we went out little C just gave me a look of complete disbelief, "Mom, there's trash in the streets!" Actually, it's not much worse than many US cities, but we hadn't been in any US cities for the 18 months before we left and coming from the exceptionally clean countries we've been in it is quite a shock. The air quality isn't great and we find mask wearing to have more than just COVID safety benefits.
However, city living does have conveniences, mainly that we are just a few minutes walk from the train and can easily make it around all the historical sites. Pompeii was first on the list, just a short train ride which we managed to bungle and turn into a two hour journey. We didn't have time to see inside all the different buildings, but we got a pretty good look. We only saw a few of the famous plaster casts of the ash encased residents, apparently many of them are no longer on display. I wasn't sure how the kids would be affected by those images anyway. S was really gripping my hand tightly when we saw the few, particularly a child one, so I'm thinking it's just as well we didn't see more. Mostly, similarly to in other ruins, they love going into little nooks and crannies and thinking about the kids who might have enjoyed those same hiding places 2,000 years ago.
We intended to do Herculaneum next, but it was closed, so we took a trip up to the crater of Vesuvius. Beautiful views and fresh air were quite a treat.
S was quite impressed by the steam.
Herculaneum was next, and the kids actually liked it better than Pompeii. It's smaller, more intact and less crowded.
After two successful train trips we were ready for Naples itself. This was more complicated, involving the train and the subway both, but we managed. We did a hop on hop off bus tour, which is a good way to get one's bearings, and took us closer to what we wanted to see than the subway could have. The younger two kids picked the site and it was the "egg castle." Castel dell'Ovo is so named because of a legend that the poet Virgil put a magic egg in its foundation and that if the egg is destroyed so will be the city of Naples. You can't actually see the egg, but you can see the original Greek structure the castle was built on top of. It's neat how it sticks out into the ocean and the kids loved the cannons.
Monday is All Saints Day and we're not sure what will be open, plus apparently many of the trains get rerouted to cemeteries, so we're taking a long weekend to relax. The kids want to go back into Naples next week to see another castle, so we'll try to fit that in. We're forecasted to get some spin off from the storm that hit Sicily, so we'll work around that. Friday we move on to Greece.