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Wednesday, August 31, 2022
We started out by walking to Piazza del Plebiscito. There we found the Basilica Reale Pontificia San Francesco da Paola. Construction of the church began in the early 1800s but was interrupted and wasn’t completed until 1846. It was a turbulent time in Naples as the city went from French Napoleonic rule back to the control of the French Bourbon Kings. The final building, both inside and out, closely resembles the Pantheon in Rome with the very obvious distinction that there is no oculus. The roof is completely closed and is topped with a cross. It was the first church in Naples to have a reverse altar.
Across the square is the Royal Palace of Naples. It was used by the House of Bourbon during the time they controlled the city. Today it is a museum and houses the National Library. Outside there are a number of larger than life statues depicting the kings of Naples.
We continued towards the harbor with the intent of touring the Castel Nuovo. Naples is known as the city of seven castles. Six of the seven are still standing and can be visited. This one sits right on the waterfront in the harbor. When we got there we were told that we’d need to make a reservation in advance. We decided to change tacks and proceeded up Via Toledo, one of the main shopping districts in Town.
We did some window shopping and finally decided to stop into a cafe for a late lunch. Deborah tried to purchase some fritters but was told that they come free when you order a drink. We ordered a couple of lemon sodas and a Neapolitan sandwich with cheese and ham. It was very pleasant sitting on the sidewalk under a large umbrella and the lemon sodas were very refreshing. The cafe had some amazing looking pastries but we decided to come back another day with better appetites.
Finally, we went back to our apartment and spent the rest of the day making reservations for various actives in the city. We plan to be very busy.
By this evening our host had completed all of the things that needed to be fixed. We now have air conditioning in the kitchen/living room, the water pressure/temperature in the shower was fixed, and the Internet was working – and even upgraded. It turns out that the washing machine worked just fine all along. We suggested that it took him four days to fix everything. He said it was three days because no work gets done on Sunday. That’s a very Italian attitude.
Thursday, September 1, 2022
We’ve been retired for five years now. Sometimes it feels like we’ve been very active and sometimes we realize that for two of those years we were just killing time in Vegas because of COVID. Who knows what the next five years will bring.
We slept rather late and so got a late start. It had rained the night before and the forecast was for significant rain throughout the day so we decided to spend our time indoors in a museum. We went to the Capodimonte National Gallery and Museum.
We tried taking showers this morning but had a problem: the line bringing water into the shower head broke. Living without a working shower would be hellish in this heat. We know that things occasionally need maintenance but after dealing with all of the other issues this was rather maddening. I tried to impress upon our host that this needed to be taken care of today without delay.
Capodimonte, which literally translates to top of the mountain, was the summer palace and gardens of King Charles III of Naples. In 1743 he established a porcelain factory there as well. He moved the factory in its entirety to Spain in 1759, the same year he inherited the throne of Spain from his brother. Today the site houses a museum of fine art. Entry costs €12.00 per person. Credit cards are accepted.
The museum floor plan indicates that it is spread over four floors. In reality there is nothing of interest on the ground floor and the fourth floor is very small. We took a long flight of stairs up to the first floor (this is Europe, floors are numbered from zero, so the first floor is what we Americans would call the second floor). There was no air conditioning whatsoever and there was very little air flow. We’ve never seen a museum that was not temperature controlled. Very strange.
The museum doesn’t seem to follow any particular layout or order except that pieces from similar time frames were grouped together. The first few rooms had a number of paintings by Titian and a few by Caravaggio. Next we were in several large rooms called the Armory. These were weapons that had been collected by various local and foreign rulers over the centuries. They had a large display of “Orientale” (Turkish) blades and a huge display of fine Medieval Italian armor.
After a trip through late Medieval / early Renaissance paintings we were finally treated to a display of 18th Century Capodimonte porcelain. Many of the pieces were white bisque but quite a few were in the more traditional Chinese / Meissen style. As a matter of fact there were two large cases full of Meissen pieces that were given to a Queen of Naples as part of her dowry.
We found some large apartments that were used by Napoleon during the time his empire included Naples. They were rather ornate with furniture and decor that reflected his obsession with everything Egyptian.
The third floor, which was air conditioned, had more traditional Renaissance paintings by artists like Carracci and Reni and there was even a painting by El Greco. The fourth floor was devoted to modern works. There was very little that interested us up there.
As is so often the case in museums the lighting was really poor in most galleries. It’s true that the palaces that typically house these museums were built long ago but even back then the nobles commissioned art to be displayed in their homes. You’d think that some attention would be given to lighting given that we’re talking about a visual art.
For lunch we tried to go to a restaurant that our host’s father had suggested. We walked in around 4:30 pm and found out that they were closed. Apparently their hours are noon until 4:00 pm and then 7:00 pm until midnight. Instead we found a trattoria on Via Toledo. We decided it was time we started eating some of the other local fare: seafood. We ordered a plate of calamari (squid) and gamberi (shrimp) and a plate of spaghetti con fruitti di mare (fruits of the sea) which had vongole (clams), cozze (mussels), gamberi (shrimp), and calamari (squid). The seafood was so fresh and delicious and we enjoyed it immensely. For dessert we found a popular gelateria down the street. Deborah had two scoops of fondente (dark chocolate) and I had a scoop of latte di cioccolato (milk chocolate), and a scoop of variegate amareno (cherry with cream). Damn they were good.
By the time we got back to the apartment the shower was fixed. We’re hoping that’s an end to all of the issues we encounter.
Friday, September 2, 2022
We got a late start and went out for lunch at restaurant that several people had recommended: Dal Soldino. It was just a five minute walk – downhill – from our apartment. I ordered the spaghetti con vongole (clams) and Deborah ordered the classic pizza Margharita (I will probably turn into a clam before we’re done with Naples). The food was very good.
After lunch we went on a tour of the Naples Underground. We’d read several descriptions of what was there but still didn’t really know what to expect. Our tour took us several long flights of stairs under the city to a depth of about 40 meters (120 feet) to a large cavern. The atmosphere down there was cool with a high humidity. It was very pleasant after walking about 30 minutes to get there on the streets above.
The first room we entered was a large vault with ceilings over 40 feet high. Our guide told us that this was a well that had been built by the Greeks over 2,500 years ago. Water collected in these underground chambers from springs in the mountains. A single shaft had been drilled into the street to reach the water and buildings had been built all around the well head thus forming the first piazzas or plazas in the city. Eventually so many of these cisterns and well heads were built that they decided to connect them all together forming a very sophisticated underground aqueduct. These wells were the primary water source for the city until the cholera epidemic of 1884.
Naples was heavily bombed during World War II. First by the allies and then, after Italy changed sides, by the Germans. Many thousands of people hid in the underground as a way of protecting themselves from the bombings. Our guide showed us three bombs that managed to find a well head and dropped all the way into the underground. Miraculously they became entangled, didn’t land on their detonators, and didn’t explode.
Thousands of years ago the Greeks learned that the easiest way to increase the rate of the water’s flow was to have it travel through narrow corridors so they built a sequence of narrow connecting tunnels. Our guide led us to a series of these tunnels and invited us to walk through them. We were warned that they were dark and very narrow in places and that we’d have to use the flashlights on our phones to guide our way. The tunnels were rather long and quite narrow. For the most part we had to walk sideways to get through and, in some place, we scraped along the edges. I wouldn’t recommend this part of the trip for anyone with claustrophobia. We came out into a large cistern that was a private well for a well to do Greek family. Then we went back in and circled back to where we started to pick up the rest of the party that hadn’t ventured in.
We saw another part of the underground that had been converted into a cellar that was used by Nuns to age their wine and store the products that they would sell to the public. Finally we climbed the stairs back to street level where our guide took us to to see the remains of a Greek theater that had been updated and expanded by the Romans. Today houses stand on what was once the foundations of those theaters. We went into a basement and saw some of the old passageways and found layers of construction relating to the Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, and modern periods. It was something to see.
Nearby we stumbled upon a large church which we just had to explore. In fact it was three churches in one. The main church, named simply the Church of Naples, was a large early Renaissance style Cathedral. On the side, where you’d expect a private chapel, we found another whole church: The Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta, a Medieval style church. On the other side was another whole church dedicated to Saint Gennaro, which included a treasury that you could tour for a fee. This one was in the high Baroque style. In the front, near the altar of the main church, was a small underground where you could view the crypt where Saint Gennaro was buried. It was quite a complex.
On the way home we stopped at a cafe and picked up some Italian pastries to try with our dinner. They put them onto plastic dishes, covered them in plastic wrap, wrapped them in fancy paper and then tied the entire package up with ribbon. I don’t wrap Christmas presents that well. It was just too beautiful to eat!
We got a cannoli, a biscotti amareno, and something chocolate with Nutella. The biscotti amareno was filled with a cherry infused chocolate paste and glazed with sugar and the chocolate thing turned out to be a chocolate cake with Nutella filling which was enrobed in chocolate and finished with chocolate shavings.
