At 6:20 a.m., we left the apartment, and hauled our cases down the street about 3 blocks to the train station.  We had reserved seats for the 5 1/2 hour trip to Naples, and were glad we did.

We had reserved our seats months in advance, and got our seats for 9 euro each (about $11), an incredible bargain.  In general, train travel in Italy is very cheap, especially if you can plan ahead.  Another bonus:  having reserved online, all you need to show the conductor is a copy of your email confirmation from Trenitalia, the Italian Rail Service, showing your booking number.  No standing in line or thumping the ticket machine.

We also learned how to use the coffee machine on the train platform, which I foresee being useful.

My rudimentary Italian has proven useful on this trip, and it proved so again when we got to Naples.  The cab driver didn’t know exactly where our address was until I sputtered something about it being “next to the Duomo” and having a “Monumento” in it.  Having arrived, we were faced with a huge, intimidating door with a small people door cut into it, locked tight.  I had been told that someone would be there to let us in, but how to find her?  Rob tried calling her number, I tried, and all we got was a message telling us in two languages that “this number has not yet been assigned”.  Click.

I channeled my inner Neapolitan, and yelled up at the lower balcony.  A head appeared, and someone said, “Angela?”  “Si”, I yelled, and a few minutes later, Giovanna let us in.  Our apartment is a bit quirky, but very nice.  We have three bedrooms (one single, which we don’t need), and two bathrooms.  We have wifi, and a nice TV with lots of stations, one even in English.  The only problem is the curved archway which isn’t high enough to walk through at the side.  The men have found this out through experience.

We have two balconies which look out, not onto the street, as you would think, but onto a courtyard which serves as the entrance for a hotel, and another balcony directly on the piazza.  Cardinal Sforza has a huge monument to himself in the piazza, which rather cuts off our view, and takes up about a quarter of the entire piazza.  It’s all situated on an ancient street called Via dei Tribunali, which was one of the three central Roman streets crossing the city in parallel in Imperial times, from east to west.  As such, most of the oldest buildings and archaealogy finds are  located here.

The old city is gritty and run-down, smelly and has an edgy, slightly dangerous feel.  I like it.  Everybody yells.  Apparently I was behaving absolutely in line with everybody else by screaming in the street.  Smaller streets branch off the Via dei Tribunali north and south, approximately, and they are densely populated with immigrants, and I would say it approximates the Lower East Side of New York at the turn of the 20th century.  You look into apartments as you pass, and there’s a table, one light, the door open and people sweating over dinner.

The people are intense, good-looking and dark.  They crowd the streets, cars zip down our street one way; there’s no sidewalk, only cobbles, and barely room to step around people out of the traffic.  Motorcycles roar up and down the streets at all hours, and the Duomo sets up a racket of booming bells, right into the bedroom, at six every evening, and in the mornings on Sunday.  Laundry hangs from balconies, and I can attest to the fact that this is practical.  It’s right there for you, and dries fast. Why  not?

Audrey and I had been chomping at the bit to do our own laundry, and there was a washing machine in the apartment.  Unfortunately it came with rudimentary and confusing directions – in Italian, of course – and it didn’t take us long to run into one snag that almost had us stumped.  It appeared that once the cycle was over, you couldn’t open the door to liberate the dripping contents without getting the procedure correct.  Click a certain knob, walk away for about fifteen minutes, then come back and open the door.  We found this out, after I got the door open prematurely and got water all over the bathroom floor.  Durp.

Today being Sunday, day 2 here, I trotted around the corner to the Duomo for nine o’clock Mass in the Chapel of San Gennaro.  S. Gennaro was a martyr who was executed in Pozzuoli in 305 A.D., and whose blood apparantly liquifies miraculously every year on September 19.  That happens to be next weekend, the day we’re supposed to leave Naples. Pozzuoli isn’t Naples, but no matter, close enough.  Naples has adopted him.

The Chapel is beautifully painted and full of items of the “Treasure of San Gennaro”, silver candelabra, and other items of value and art.  Look at the floor of the photo on the right, below.  Even the floor is inlaid with three colors of marble in a precise design.

When I got “home”, we set off for the Naples Archaeological Museum.  It has a great collection of ancient sculpture and some Egyptian artifacts, as well as an exhibition of hundreds of items from Pompeii, which were looted by collectors, before people realized that we would all understand much more about these things if we could see where they had been, in context.  The mosaics were very intricate at times, being made up of so many tiny pieces that if you stand just a few feet away, they are as subtle as paintings.  I hadn’t realized that mosaic had ever been used so finely.

The museum had a lot of interesting items, but was poorly curated.  There was no guide to the museum, except for one we found afterwards in the bookshop, for 12 euro.  Since the entrance had cost 13 euro already, it’s unlikely we would have forked out so much for a guide.  But all that was available was a poorly xeroxed plan of the museum, with numbers in each “room”, and no indication of what might be there.  I had to go back to ask what floor we were on, since you can enter on so many levels in these huge Italian buildings, I couldn’t tell if I was on the ground floor or the first.  There were no signs directing you to one floor or the other, you just had to wander around.  Having said that, it was definitely worth a trip, and I would even put it at the top of the list.

All of these items came from Pompeii.  The last image is of braziers and stoves found in one of the houses.  Amazing that they should still be intact.

When we came out of the museum, we were accosted by a well-spoken young man, who offered to walk us to the restaurant he worked for, where, he assured us, we would have a great lunch.  Rob and Audrey agreed to go with him, so we tagged along, and he was right;  we were off the main road in a quiet side street, in the shade, and had salads and light, white wine.

Then we went home and I had a two-hour nap.  Tomorrow:  Capri.