Naples was a bit of a disappointment if I’m being honest. I mentioned before that I didn’t want to get my hopes up in Rome and tried to control my expectations. I should’ve done the same thing in Naples because I realized pretty quickly that its a bit more grungy than I expected from an Italian city. As Tiffany joked when I was texting her about it “how dare you have real cities with real people…I want the fairytale Italy in my mind!”. And it’s so true. I felt a bit of a disconnect of expectations vs reality while I was there. That being said – I did still enjoy my time there!

Naples

Due to the disconnect, (and the desire to start slowing down) I will admit that I didn’t do as much in Naples as I have in a lot of other places I’ve been to on this journey. I still wandered around though and saw parts of the city!

One of the main things that I did though was contact Powell who I met at the Redhead Festival in the Netherlands back in August. He’s from Naples and so we met up on Friday for a while to chat. We didn’t end up meeting up again during my stay – but it was good to catch up for a while and fun to send the picture of us to the group so they could all be jealous ;).

I think my favorite day in Naples was my second day where I decided to walk along the water. It was so relaxing to just walk the boardwalk and take in the smell and blue of the sea. I ended up walking way more than I had planned to, just enjoying my time. Before I knew it I’d been walking the water for hours and ended up so far away from my hostel it took almost an hour to get back by train! A total of 25k steps were walked and my legs were feeling a bit watery by the time I got back to my hostel.

Pompeii

One of the biggest things I wanted to do while I was in the area was visit Pompeii. I had planned to spend a full day there as I had talked to some people at the hostel who told me that however long I think it’ll take, double it if not triple it. Honestly – there’s a reason they sell a 3 day ticket option.

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite turn out like that. I ended up missing my train to Pompeii and the next one wasn’t for an hour. Let me say now for those who are looking to do the same. “Platform 1” is not in the central station of Naples. It’s actually one of 2 platforms on Linea 2 – one of the local metro lines. Linea 2 actually also serves the area surrounding Naples and therefore runs trains and not just the subway. Linea 1 is local only. This is something I didn’t know until I had walked from the metro station to the main central station looking for platform 1 – only to ask someone and be told that it was Linea 2, platform 1. A bummer, but not the end of the world.

By the time I got out to Pompeii, it was a bit later than I wanted it to be, but I still took a moment to explore a little bit of the downtown area. It’s surprisingly not as touristy outside of the ruins as I was expecting. But I guess that makes sense as most people probably only visit to see the ruins.

Despite being told – and totally agreeing with – that it would be a full day to see Pompeii. I ended up being there for about 2.5 hours and that was plenty for me. It’s really cool – but it’s so big and you have to walk everywhere. I ended up walking another 21k steps total that day, and this was after the 25k steps the day before. There are things that I didn’t see in Pompeii that I am considering coming back to check out – but knowing my time limit (it closes at 5pm this time of year), I only got the express ticket which gives access to the Ancient City not any of the extra sites/museums. That was all I needed – but if I come back I’ll probably pay for a full blown tour. 

The ancient city itself is a maze that is really easy to lost in. There is a map and everything is marked – but there are a lot of areas that are roped off (and at 4pm they start closing even more areas), so it’s really easy to miss entire sections. Having a guide who knows the city would definitely be worth it. And that would probably have the added benefit from having access to the other areas that I didn’t pay to get in this time.

The city was an amazing experience though. There were a lot of tourists there, but despite that – the city is so big that there were times that I had an entire area to myself (this probably was also helped by the fact that it’s the off-season). But one of the first things I noticed as I walked into the city was the smell. There was a distinct smell that somewhat reminded me of ash and disuse. Which is kind of crazy since the city itself has been uncovered for a long time and has a lot of tourists that go through. Then there was the fact that sound was muted in the city. Most of the buildings are missing their roofs, but even so – sometimes people would be talking right around the corner and I’d have no clue they were there until I turned it. This wasn’t always the case as there were some areas that were more heavily populated with tourists, but in a lot of the area there was the same type of hushed and muted sound that I experienced when I was at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin.

Other than the smell and sound, the bricks that made up the city were definitely impacted by the eruption for all that they remain standing. They are very porous and feel really delicate despite the fact that they are thousands of years old. I wander how much the eruption changed/impacted them. Obviously some of what they had were created from volcanic rock – but I don’t think that the bricks that made their homes were one of them (though someone correct me if I’m wrong! I didn’t look it up.).

Overall – it was a great experience with everyone I saw giving the place the respect it deserved. The closest that I got to wanting to hit someone was when someone was commenting on the casts that have been made from the people that died. The casts are made possible due to the series of events in the eruptions and they were able to create casts of real people who perished. One tourist kept commenting on how “stunning” the casts were and when one of his travel mates said “are those bones?” nearby he basically screamed “bones!” and rushed over to see them. To me this attitude seemed a bit disrespectful – when everyone else was taking in the magnitude in respectful (and awed) silence compared to his completely apparent glee/excitement. But maybe he’s an anthropologist who loves these things.