Pompei and Pizza and Napoli

We awoke at 5 a.m. and were ferried down the hill from Crevari to Voltri so that we could catch the train that would take us to Genova Principe. Knowing that we needed to catch our train, Luciano sped down the hill avoiding parked cars on either side. It was a path he had probably done thousands of times. At 82 years of age, he had lived in Crevari since birth. He knew every edible plant and animal on the mountain and every place in the tiny road that widened just enough for two cars to pass each other (even if this meant that both drivers had to pull their mirrors in).

I  held onto the edge of the seat. Anyone who has ever ridden with me knows that I am not the calmest driver. Some would even call me “not safe.” But for someone who is used to going fast in traffice, I was a novice when it came to the 82-year-old Luciano. It was if he had a seventh sense that was geared toward driving a small car through smaller spaces while simultaneously detecting oncoming traffic and places in the road he could use to avoid it.

We arrived at the tiny station of Voltri and said our goodbyes. After grabbing a train at Principe we sat down to enjoy the ride to Napoli. This was the first time I had ever been this far south and I was nervous as to how the people were and how prevalent crime was. Since there weren’t any numbers on a couple of the train cabins, we counted the number and then shuffled ourselves and our bulky bags down the narrow aisles until we got to our assigned seats.

We put our bags up above our seats and the fit was so tight  that the straps from our bags dangled down. After about an hour we had dozed off. We were awakened by loud talking in a language I didn’t understand. A lady who looked she was Chinese boarded the train staring at a piece of paper and barking orders. A gaggled of other Chinese trailed in behind but not before taking pictures of themselves in front of the train. Once aboard they began to walk right toward our seats constantly gazing at the numbers above the seats until their leader stopped in front of our seats.

“Sixty five and sixty six,” the lady said to me in English and then pointed at her ticket. Sure enough, it looked like she had booked our seats as well. I showed her my ticket and pointed to the seats marked “sixty five” and “sixty six.” Her eyes got wide and she mumbled “double booking.” It was obvious that everyone in her group understand that term. The phrase passed from the guy standing next to the leader all the way down a girl at the end like some weird game of telephone. “Double booking, double booking, double booking,” they said as each person took a turn repeating the condemning phrase.

I told her that I spoke Italian and that I’d ask the train director why we both had the same seat. When he arrived he looked at me like I was stupid. And I was stupid. But it wasn’t entirely my fault. If the cabins had been marked I would have easily found our seats. Apparently we were in cabin one and our ticket was for cabin two. We gave the “double booking” chanters their seats and moved down a little ways so that we didn’t have to take all our luggage down. We arrived at the station in Naples without further incident.

We had about an hour or so before our train left for Salerno. I found a small supermarket inside the station and after paying a euro ($1.40) to use the bathroom, I grabbed a couple of salads and some other snacks so we could eat lunch before continuing our trip further south. As we walked over to the platform where our train was due, a woman ran into my side and appeared to hurt herself on my bag. She turned around after she passed and yelled at me. What she yelled was in such poor Italian that I couldn’t really understand her except that apparently I had “hurt her.” I was about to apologize when a train director pulled me aside and told me that she was a gypsy and used that tactic frequently to rob people at the station. The gypsies run into you and steal your stuff from your pockets upon contact. You are generally too distracted and alarmed that you ran into someone to check your pockets and valuables. By the time you realize your pockets have been empty they are long gone and you never connect the encounter with the theft.

We boarded the regional train for Salerno and sat down across from two men. One was tall and dark and seemed to be something other than Italian. The other was a little shorter and was constantly typing on a Galaxy pad tablet or his cell phone. It turned out the guy on his tablet was a priest who had just finished his training in Rome and was on his way home to start his priesthood. His name was Alfonso and he was heading to Salerno as well. Once the guy sitting next to him hear us speaking he joined in the conversation as well. We chatted about the States and Italy and why Naples has a problem with the city’s garbage. The told me of all the place surrounding Naples that we should visit. I asked Alfonso about a train we had to connect with at Salerno to get to Pompei and he pulled up the schedules on his tablet. The train we were on had wifi and he was able to log on because he was a subscriber. He found that we had about 10 minutes to find the platform and board our train before it left for Pompei. As a priest, Alfonso receives about 800 euro every month, which equates to about $1200 US dollars. Because he feared we might miss the train Alfonso told us to head to the 2^nd platform and he’d go buy our tickets for us so that we wouldn’t miss it.

We exited the train and hurried to our platform. After about five minutes, Alfonso arrived with a sweaty face and handed us each our ticket. We shook hands and thanked him for his kindness and boarded our train just in time to enter a packed commuter train. There was no room for us to sit so we stood in the breezeway.

Within minutes of the train leaving we began to see little dark-skinned adolescents walk back and forth between the cabins. They did this every 10 minutes or so with increasing frequency. I put our bags behind me so that I could watch them and any hands that might try to open them. Just before the next stop, two train directors corralled a band of gypsies and walked them through the breezeway. The adolescents that had been running back and forth were in the group accompanied by several other women. They were yelling at the train directors in broken Italian and were shoving and pushing inside the crowded breezeway. From what the directors had said, they gypsies had been riding the train without a ticket. Because of this, they were being forced off at the next stop. The gypsies continued do push and wail as we got closer to the station. When we stopped we all exited the train. They gypsies stood at the side of the train and made rude gestures at the people seated inside laughing and whistling.

Not wanting to draw any more attention to ourselves that we already had, Carolyn and I snuck down the stairs and walked to the front of the station to ask for directions. There wasn’t anyone from Pompei there so I went into the bar and asked where Via Carlo Alberto was. The directions from the barista were pretty straightforward: go up the street and turn right at the piazza. We followed the street up to a magnificent church several stories tall and walked past a fountain without water to our hotel.

The hotel Apollo was on the second floor and run by an Italian family. A mother was at the front desk and an elderly woman sat on a couch in the foyer ironing towels. A large man sat in a recliner in a wife beater watching television in the room behind the front desk. We checked in and the lady led us down a short hallway to our room. Once there, we opened up our shades and the window. It was smoldering outside and we noticed that there was no air conditioning.  We were so hot and tired from the train ride and all we wanted to do was get something to eat and drink. After spending 45 minutes walking down streets with closed businesses we realized that nothing was open on Sunday in Pompei. We finally settled on a couple bottles of water at a bar and a pizza from across the street from our hotel. We ordered a margherita (sauce and mozzarella) and one with mozzarella di bufala. This is a very delicious type of mozzarella that is from Naples. We returned to our room and sat on the balcony and ate our dinner. We were so tired from the travel and walking all day that after our showers we fell fast asleep. Until I was awaked about an hour later in pool of sweat. My hair was soaked. And my body had a thin layer of water all over it.

I got to my feet and went over to the window and looked out it. Crowds of people began appearing on the streets, well-dressed and speaking in loud tones. From my groggy state it seemed as if everyone on the entire street was yelling at each other. Despite all this noise, I could easily hear the entire phone conversation of the girl parked right below our window. I closed some shutters and the sound diminished substantially. Whatever breeze existed was now shut off in favor of quiet. I went to the shower and grabbed a towel to lay on and climbed back into bed. With my earplugs snugly in my ears I lay flat on my back so that my arms and legs wouldn’t come into contact with my body lest they stick there. Less than 30 minutes later I got up to open the window. It was too hot to sleep. The noise on the street had gotten progressively louder until it finally died at about two in the morning. Not to be outdone by the noisy people, a noisy garbage truck drove along the street collecting glass and smashed the brittle material in his truck for 30 minutes. During this battle with my surroundings I keep feeling something jump on and off my body. Before we’d hit the lights, I’d seen a couple of smashed mosquitoes on the wall near the headboard so I figured that they must be landing on my occasionally. The strange thing was they never bit.

I cant’ write that we awoke the next morning because I don’t think we ever really slept. Carolyn had mysterious red bites on her body to garnish her already swollen mosquito bites she received in Genova. We had decided to spend a couple of hours at the ruins of Pompei and then head to a small village on the outskirts of Naples to sleep that night. The decision was an easy one: we couldn’t spend another night at the hotel Apollo.

It was only a couple of minutes to the entrance to the ruins from our hotel and we were excited to see the site especially since there were remains of people and dogs among the things that were uncovered. Lining the entrance to Pompei were street vendors whose sales approach was similar to that of carnies at the circus. Once I responded in Italian they left us alone. In fact, I told one woman I was Italian when she gave me her pitch in English and her response was “meno male,” or thank goodness. I got the sneaking suspicion that these carnies didn’t prey on fellow Italians – just foreigners. Speaking in Italian worked well to keep them at bay.

We approached the ticket office and had read online that tickets for people ages 19-25 were eight euro. Being on a tight budget, every savings, even small ones, were welcome. As we began to pay for the tickets the guide told us that the eight euro price only applied to the European community and not for anyone else. I was really annoyed by this and told the guy when he came to American I hoped that there was a separate price for us Americans and something more expensive for him since he was Italian. Not only did we not get the discount like the rest of the Europeans there, that were all out of booklets in English that described the sites of Pompei that was supposed to accompany our tickets.

Pompei was interesting for the interested. I enjoyed all the ruins and the craftsmanship of the streets but after a couple of hours all the houses started to blend together. In fact, it was difficult to orient ourselves because the small map they had given us had writing so small that it would have taken a microscope to see it. We walked down many dead end streets trying to find our way out of the ancient maze only to come to a dead end sign that would have been more appropriately placed at the entrance to the street instead of the end. When you are at the end of a dead end street a sign only adds insult to injury. Dripping with sweat from walking around an ancient, shadeless city for two hours in the blistering heat we decided we’d head back to our hotel and pack our things for the 11 a.m. checkout.

We said goodbye to the family that operated the hotel and promised we’d be back (a polite gesture only) and headed down the street to the station to catch our train to the stop where our hostel was on the outskirts of Naples. The train was so packed that we stood in the breezeway again and waited the 25 minutes for our stop. We got off the train at Portici Erculano, a small town on the edge of the Mediterranean. With the sea at our backs, we crossed the tracks and followed the directions to the hostel. Navigating Italy is difficult even for someone who speaks the language and has lived there. Not every street has a sign in the same place, numbers are mixed, streets stop and start at different places in the city and when someone tells you make a left at a roundabout you have to choose between three streets that go left. We chose the one in the middle and walked uphill for about 25 minutes. If the sidewalks had been smooth like in the States it wouldn’t have been nearly a challenge. Unfortunately, they were typical for smaller Italian cities and were made of irregular cobblestone that made pulling our luggage difficult. I wondered how many high heels had been broken off walking on these disjointed rocks.

Exhausted again from train rides and walking we arrived at the hostel in a slightly shady area of Portici. The hostel, called Fabric, was in a poorer residential area and actually shared a courtyard with neighbors. But what the hostel lacked in curb appeal it made up for in service and comfort. Our room, although on the third floor, did have air conditioning. We turned it on as soon as we entered the room and set the lowest setting possible. We flung our bags on the ground and I hung my shirt up to dry on two cabinets.

The hostel had a recreation room, a music room that had a full bar and a piano, wifi and clean showers. The rooms were small but comfortable and after my shirt dried we walked back downstairs and left to explore the city a little before dinner. Besides a small market we’d found and a delicious bread shop, there wasn’t a whole lot to the small city. We came back and drank from bottles of aranciata as we checked our email and used skype to contact family to let them know of our whereabouts. A small group of Australians was noisily laughing and telling stories and after a guy named Michael came over and introduced himself. There were four of them from Sydney all traveling together through Europe. Shy, Patrick and Jeff rounded out the foursome. As they recounted some of their experiences from their journeys we realized they were quite fearless. We met a couple of Americans as well, Matt and Susan, both nurses. We all watched clips on YouTube. I shared some of Australian spiders that they had never seen and they shared some of what they call “stacking.” The word means anything from stubbing your toe to eating it on a snowboard. If you go to YouTube and type in “big stacks” you won’t get big stacks of anything but will get nutty Aussie’s posting video clips of themselves that would make JackAss producers proud.

The group decided that we’d go eat at a restaurant that Michael had heard of. We walked down toward the station and my skills as a translator seemed to impress. I could see all the Italian locals eyeing us as we all clambered for our chairs. When the waitress came up to us I discovered that you couldn’t get anything to eat there, that it was only a bar. She left briefly and came back with a suggestion of a place to eat that had good food near the center of town where we’d come from. We got up and were off walking to the Reginella. The eight of us walked at least a mile along the road while locals zipped by in their vehicles narrowly missing us as they sped along the narrow streets.

I’ve had to reeducate myself on how Italians judge distance. Every time I’ve asked for directions the response has been “just right up the street.” An American would have said something along the lines of, “it’s pretty far, I’m not sure I would walk if I were you.” I’ve come to understand that, because they walk everywhere all day long, it IS “just up the street” to them. To an American however, that is NOT used to walking 10 miles a day, it is a long ass walk. Some cultures would define a walk of this magnitude as exercise and dress themselves accordingly with running shoes, headphones and running shorts. For Italians, it was just part of their normal daily routine.

After asking a couple more people where the Reginella restaurant was we finally arrived. The metal gate was closed over the restaurant windows and there was no sign of life inside. The group, although happy, was also hungry and was not happy that the recommendation hadn’t panned out. I asked a man that was talking to his friend in a Chrysler if he knew why the restaurant was closed. He informed me that it was always closed on Monday. I asked them for another recommendation for a place to eat and made sure to point out that we didn’t want to eat where tourists eat but somewhere the locals hung out. They began to give me directions that started with the usual kiss-of-death phrase “just go right up the street.” I then heard the guy on the street say to the guy in the car, “you think they’ll fit?” I looked at the guy in the car and said, “Ci stiamo,” or “We’ll fit.” He motioned us to all quickly get into his car. Carolyn and I got in the front with her on my lap and the six others got in the back with two lying horizontal across the laps of the others. Matt and Susan looked a little skeptical of the whole situation while the quartet of Aussies welcomed the adventure with a cheer.

Arturo drove down the road and we made small talk. He works as a mechanic and lives in Portici. We drove about 10 minutes or the Italian equivalent of “just right up the street” and arrived at a pizzeria. Arturo entered before us and spoke to the owner. The owner made a signal to a waiter who then disappeared through the back of the restaurant. Arturo explained that his cousin worked here and that they had great food. The waiter had gone to prepare a large table for us in the back of the pizzeria. We all ordered a different pizza and Alfonso (the owner) cut each pizza into eight slices. While we waited, Alfonso brought out some fried appetizers that appeared to be nothing more than salted, fried dough. It was a great snack to tide us over before dinner. Once the pizzas arrived we all ate a piece, waited for everyone to finish then passed the pizzas clockwise so that everyone got to taste one slice of eight different pizzas. We were so synchronized that the whole operation seemed like a giant machine. We spent the night stuffing our faces until we were so full that we couldn’t eat another bite.