Well, have we had a weekend! A weekend dripping with fresh tomatoes and mozzarella, along with doppio 00 flour and sea salt.
A weekend, in short, full of pizza and Naples.
(In fact, this weekend of pizza excited me so that this morning, rather than explaining to the secretary of my Italian language school that I was in class last week (passato), I told him that my week was tomato sauce (passata).)
Since my husband is the true lover of pizza in this particular partnership, I will leave the pizza-blogging to him - including the many and varied wonders of PizzaFest '06 - and concentrate on the not-entirely-pizza-related aspects of our weekend.
Friday, we ran across town to the train station to catch a Naples-bound Eurostar train, which got us there in a relatively blistering three and a half hours. Not bad! In Naples, we met up with Anna, a girl in Husbear's cookin' school from Maryland.
We stayed in a bed and breakfast near the train station, run by a very nice lady with a very large dog named Pigi - as in, "No, Pigi, no! Veni qui (come here)!" The place was adorable, though, with ony two rooms furnished in a way that makes it very clear you are in someone's house. I'd stay there again.
It was on a tiny street, vico sant'elmo, which we found archetypically Neapolitan.
The place was arrayed around a central courtyard which always seemed to contain a complement of Neapolitan women and children.
Our first morning there, we awoke for cafe, plums, and bread with jam from the proprietress, and then walked to Attanasio for sfogliatelle, a Neapolitan pastry which we'd heard inspires poetry. It's stuffed with a ricotta and candita (candied citrus rind) filling.
There are two types, and we found we preferred the frolla. Though apparently not as traditional, I liked this softer, more biscuit-like version to the harder, many layered ricca.
Besides the two kinds of sfogliatelle, we also tried a conrnetto crema (croissant stuffed with cream), and baba, a light spongy bread soaked in rum. And I mean, SOAKED.
(baba on right, due sfogliatelle frolle on the left.)
Attanasio's pastries were amazing. They had a stuffed bakery case, full of many more treats we wanted to get our hands on, but we only had so many stomachs between the three of us.
Post-breakfast, we half-drunkenly staggered to the location Rough Guide picked out as the departure point for Mount Vesuvius-bound buses. Of course, this being southern Italy, we found that the guide's information was out of date and we had missed the last direct bus. So, around to the circumvesuviana train we went. Taking this to the stop for Pompeii, we got out and walked down a small hill past souvenir vendors to a waiting bus.
Husbear got on the bus to ask if it was the one we needed to take up Vesuvius, and the driver said, "Yes! Yes! You get on now!" Husbear asked if we needed to buy tickets, and was told "You buy at the top!"
This is a different protocol than most buses in Italy, where you buy your tickets at tabaccherie before boarding and then validate them on the bus, but we shrugged and boarded. Italy.
We rode with our fellow passengers for about 20 minutes or so up the volcano, occasionally catching glimpses of Naples and, closer in, a sculpture exhibit lining the approach. Then, we pulled into this large (for Italy) parking lot, anchored by a small green souvenir stand.
A man in his late 70s boarded the bus and let loose a string of Italian. Seeing that he had achieved an approximate 50 percent comprehension rate, he switched to English and said "You will stop here for thirty minutes, and your bus will then take you up to the place from where you can walk to the crater. Now you get off the bus, you buy your tickets, you hear a story."
Well, with instructions like that...
We poked around the small souvenir stand for a few minutes, which reminded me of nothing so strongly as it did the private caves in Kentucky and Tennessee - the ones with the "gift shops" full of confederate flags and snowglobes.
Only this one came with a very old dog and a bar piled with crap.
And shelves bursting with glittery volcano-rock horses, and dogs, and cats, and angels, and globes...
And postcards that I can't imagine they had any interest in selling, given that they looked like they had been put into the display rack sometime in 1996 and left out in the elements to age.
It was at about this point that I heard yelling erupting from near the door. A Chinese woman, traveling with her husband and young son, had picked up a tourist book off of a rack and begun leafing through it. Our erstwhile owner just lost it on her, yelling "you open it, now you owe me ten euro!" When the woman protested that the book's plastic cover had in fact already been taken off of the book, the owner reared back and yelled:
"BULLSHIT!"
Somehow, the woman managed to get the book back into satisfactory condition, and put it back on the rack without having to buy it, but I think it was a close thing!
It was at this point that the owner gathered us around at the door of the stand, announcing that it was time for his story.
Apparently, there was a funicular that used to run tourists up to the lip of the crater. This souvenir stand owner had been the one to run the machinery and sell tickets. He did this for many years, until the funicular was struck by lightning and had to be rebuilt. The government of Italy told him, "Antonio, you wait two years, you will work again with the funicular."
But then: "The greenpeace, the environmentalists, they say, 'no funicular!'. So, every day, I am punished, and I must tell this same story again to many tourists. So, you buy information book, I will include news story about me, and I will put my blue finger on it (at this point, he held up an ink-stained index finger), only 10 euro."
He led us inside and charged 8.60 euros (face value) each for our round-trip bus tickets. Upon closer examination under the outside light, we realized that the tickets we bought had been validated three times each - but at that point, what were we going to do? File onto the bus and revalidate the tickets, of course.
The bus took us up to a new parking lot, this one lined with multiple souvenir stands and bars, with a ticket stand at the far end. Relieved to have arrived at the correct location, we got off the bus, bought our tickets, and began the ascent to Mt. Vesuvius' crater lip.
The weather was GREAT - probably 20 degrees cooler at the top than down in the heart of Naples.
(Husbear and Anna begin the climb)
Just past the entrance, a (husband and wife?) team handed us our very own walking sticks. It was free, though they had a tip box and we gave them a couple of euro.
The ascent was fairly steep, though not too intense. There were great views of Naples and the surrounding suburbs on one side, and on the other - a lightly smoking crater.
Unfortunately, the volcano falls squarely in that category of sights that are extremely difficult to photograph, in that it's very large and the views in each direction are remarkably varied.
In this picture, you can sort of see Herculaneum - it's to the right, under a patch of green. Helpful, I know.
The crater lip we were walking on is the product of the last major eruption of the volcano in 1944.
Husbear kept trying to get that perfect picture - I do think he shot some good ones!
The trail was maintained really well - I didn't fall through a single fissure. Though there were quite a few people there, the trail was long enough and wide enough that it didn't feel oppresive. Plus, we just kept enjoying the weather, and that lovely breeze that was so hard to come by in Naples.
After what seemed to me to be a good bit of light hiking (but would probably be more accurately described as a "stroll") we finally made it to the top, where a - guess - souvenir stand sold items made of sparkly rock, as well as shots of espresso and glasses of Lachryma Christi, a wine cultivated on the slopes of Vesuvius.
Man, sometimes I really love Italy.
After conquering (via a well-signed trail and busses) Mount Vesuvius, it was time to head back into Naples to see if we could conquer PizzaFest.
But first, an enormous bag of fried food. It had been a while since our cheese- and cream-stuffed pastries, and we were getting a little peckish.
Friggitorie can be found all over Naples, selling such fried lovelies as krocche (fried potato croquettes), arancini (fried sausage-stuffed rice balls), fiorilli (cheese-stuffed squash blossoms), et cetera et cetera.
We got a big bag of everything plus et cetera (minus those pizzas you see in the bottom left - we were on our way to PizzaFest and had to draw the line somewhere!)
Yup... all of the above, plus fried polenta triangles, fried eggplant, and fried bread (!).
I don't think I can adequately describe the tastiness in this bag.
An Italian oddity - no napkins, just folded computer paper. We've noticed this everywhere - in fact, today for lunch I bought a calzone wrapped in computer paper. Just worth a mention.
PizzaFest was an all-inclusive extravaganza INCLUDING disco spettacolo, which Husbear will tell you about later.
Suffice it to say that we were out of bed a bit late on Sunday, though we still managed to fit in a sfogliatelle or two. About 10:30, we found ourselves in a funicular heading up the hill towards Castel Sant'Elmo, a 14th-century political prison with great views of Naples.
I had the same reaction to this building that I did to the Forte Belvedere in Florence - I wouldn't want to storm it by myself!
Castel Sant'Elmo had stunning views across Naples. Mt. Vesuvius was so high up that most everything was covered by haze, but at the castel it was much easier to see the lay of the land.
Compared to Vesuvius, even the height of the Castel Sant'Elmo didn't shield us from the September heat. There wasn't much shade on top of the building, so we beat a restreat back down and through the streets, heading in the direction of the port.
I had never been in this area of Naples before, the hilly area known as the Vomero, and I was really taken by its beauty. We didn't run into many people (perhaps the heat of the day kept people inside?) but the folks we did run into were local and very nice. A teenager helped us with the last little stretch to the funicular station when we came close to getting lost, walking us almost to the entrance of the station.
Back down in the area of town close to the port, it was quite hot again. And we were hungry. Pizzatime!
But first, a little something to cool off.
That's real Italian ice, in the form of frozen lemoade complete with bits of rind. It was really refreshing and tasted of actual lemon, not that fake lemon pledgy cleaning product yuck.
And then - one more pizza, and back to the station for our trains to Florence.
I am SO HAPPY we made it to Naples for pizzafest! Though we've been to the city twice before, both times were just for one night and we didn't have a chance to explore. This trip, I was even getting used to the "step off the curb in front of moving traffic" method of crossing the street.
Husbear has about 150 pictures of pizza to go through before he can even imagine crafting a post - hopefully, there will be an illustrated ode to pizza here before too long.
arrivederci and ci vediamo!
girlie
