Arrivederci, bella Napoli!

A continuation of the trip reports I did post-Italia in November, 2007...

TRIP REPORT - NAPLES, DAY TWO

We woke up early Tuesday, since we had to pack and get ready to leave for Sorrento.  Mohammed brought our breakfast again—this time, since he noticed we didn’t eat all of the yogurt the day before, he brought us cereal!  I thought that was very thoughtful.  They also gave us more coffee than before, which was nice, too.  After breakfast, we decided to do one of Rick Steves’ walking tours of Naples before we left (even though I'm not a fan of Rick Steves - remind me to tell you about my Parisian experience with his guidebooks), plus we wanted to go through Spaccanapoli again to buy some of the Christmas wares.  It was a lot of stuff to try to cram into the two hours we had before meeting another friend and catching the train to Sorrento.  We definitely needed more time to do the walking tour—it was great to see some of the sites, but we didn’t have time to tour anything.  But at least we got a view of Mt Vesuvius!!   

We had to split up to try to see more things – my pal and I found this amazing soap shop, where they were making the soap in-house.  I got a gorgeous bar of soap made with mint there.  But there were so many neighborhoods we didn’t get to explore at all.  I definitely would’ve liked more time to look around the waterfront area and I wanted to tour the opera house, Castle Nuovo and Castel dell’Ovo, but there just wasn’t time.  I also wanted to head up to Museo di Capodimonte and we didn’t get there either.  So, we have another city that we’ll have to return to and explore further!  Not a bad thing. 

One thing that nearly derailed our good travel karma was that we stopped in the tourist information office in the Piazza del Plebiscito to ask about ferry service to Sorrento.  They told us there was a ferry that afternoon.  But when we were checking out of our hotel, they said they didn’t think there were ferries, so they called the ferry company for us.  Nope, no ferries!  Good thing we asked at our hotel front desk.  They were great—they gave us a taxi voucher to get to the train station, which was really helpful in avoiding the dreaded taxi rip-off.  We gave our driver the voucher and a tip and he seemed really pleased by it, so another fear was avoided.  It was a quick and easy trip to the train station, where we quickly found ourselves on a train to Sorrento.  Aha!  There’s the graffiti I’ve heard about!  But so what.  

We found Naples to be delightful—if Rome is all about the past, Naples is all about living in the present.  The people there were living their lives and we just tried to move amongst them.  The shopping was great and inexpensive (our gentleman companion bought a beautiful suit!) and the food was even better.  You can talk for days about how pizza is better in Italy, but my golly, it's pretty darned true!!  Our hotel was also wonderful and I would love to stay there again.  I adored losing myself in the streets of Spaccanapoli and can’t wait to lose myself there again.   Maybe it’s because we’re New Yorkers, but we didn’t find the graffiti or the grime or the fast pace disturbing at all.  We loved how it felt so different from Rome.  And Sorrento was different as well!  I feel like we really got the best of all possible worlds when we were there.  Onwards to Sorrento!  Lemons, here we come!!!