Max's Summer Travel Journals: Days 12-15: Naples, Herculaneum, Pompeii, Salerno, Paestum, and the Amalfi Coast

As usual, I have given myself less time to write than I should have, so I am going to dive into this, write as much as I can in fifteen minutes or so, and return to it tomorrow—sooner rather than later, I hope.

I slept well on the ferry to Naples. I must have gotten little sleep the previous night, as I went to bed at something like 9:00 PM. The sheets were cool (and starched!), and the ferry’s movement conduced to sleep. I woke up surprisingly awake for its being 5:45 AM and discovered that the carton of mango juice that I had bought and opened the previous night had, due to a design failure (and my having left it in my backpack in the first place), leaked through the night and soaked through many of my possessions. Luckily for me, I had my hostel bookings, maps, foreign currency, and other travel documents in plastic folders that protected them, and my laptop cover (called a “sleeve,” I believe) was, as it turned out, of the highest quality, for my laptop itself was dry. I spent most of my remaining time on the ferry trying to mop up my backpack before stepping out onto the poop deck to watch the ferry’s arrival in Naples.

To my disappointment, I missed the sunset over Naples despite its being shortly after 6:00 AM; when I stepped on deck, the sun was already well over the horizon. Although I would like to paint a picture of Naples’ port as a paragon of architectural beauty, what I remember principally is, as it would be in almost any country, the water. As the boat turned in preparation for docking, Mount Vesuvius swung gradually view, pale blue against the water’s blue, towering over the bay. The Bay of Naples is crowned, in fact, in hills, much like that of Palermo; in the distance, where we had come from, the water merged with the sky, unbroken by any trace of land. Sea gulls now wheeled over the ferry, and the water churning beneath us roared, if my memory is to be trusted (I may, at this point, just be adding Romantic details for effect.). Naples itself was unbecoming: its landscape consisted of row after row of apartment blocks (Italy reminds me more of Russia with every stop.) abutted by the occasional domed church or castle. (The harbor was heavily bombed in World War II, which must have stripped its old-world charm.) I took a great many photos, of course, hoping to capture everything from a distance so as to absolve myself from having to see it up close; I was resolved to spend only an hour or so in Naples in total.

I would, naturally, spend more time in Naples than expected. When I stepped off of the ferry, I was greeted by the customary total lack of information that one encounters in any Italian city, large or otherwise. One of the dock workers told me which bus to take into town, then, when I asked a woman nearby how to get to the train station (when no bus had shown up), I was told that the coming tram would work. I did not see any ticket machine, though, and trusted buses more than trams, for one can talk to human beings on them and buy tickets (in most countries) fairly trivially (from the driver). Of course, when my bus came, I learned that I would have to go around the corner—this would require my asking directions a few more times—to the local tobacconist to get a ticket; they did not sell them on the bus itself. It was at this point, I believe, that something broke in me and I began to count down the days until I could leave Italy for good, though I may have begun doing so earlier in my trip than I am giving myself credit for.

I had an easy enough time getting a ticket when I found the tobacconist (a few blocks away), and, when I returned to the bus station, the lady who had helped me find the tobacconist told me that my ticket was good for all forms of public transport (the tram was coming and was, she said, quicker); I could not understand what she was waiting for at 7:00 AM or why it was taking so long, but people have often seemed to be idly waiting for things indefinitely since I came here. On the way to the bus station, I passed a store called “Sport Hobby Horse,” with the ‘y’ written backwards (like an upside-down lambda? I know my Greek letters poorly). There was no sidewalk at all on many of the streets that we passed—stores gave out right into the road, which was made of cobblestones, one of the few relics that the Napolese (Neopolitans?) have preserved. I noted the tram ride in my notes (I keep doubly saying the word “notes.”) but do not know why; perhaps there was garbage strewn left and right or the ride was particularly bumpy. In any case, I made it to the train station, wandered around it for ages, bought a ticket to Salerno, and then decided to go to Herculaneum and Pompeii that very day and make my way to Salerno from there. I was mad that I had bought a useless ticket and blamed the whole of Italy for it. I was feeling addled and tired.

Herculaneum—that is, the archaelogical site—was easy to find and had some spectacular ruins. I rolled my suitcase with me to the site, as, while people at the tourist office had told me that there would be storage lockers there, they were wrong, as I had predicted that they would be (I was banking on leaving my stuff in Pompeii.). I spent twenty minutes or so debating whether or not to buy a ticket to look at the ruins (because I should) or leave them and save a few dollars (because I wanted to). I could see the vast majority of them from above anyway, as they are in a sort of basin at the bottom of a hill that leads down to them, and it is not fenced off as some other monuments (e.g., the archaeological park in Syracuse) have been. In the end, my better sense won out—that is, my desire to do what I wanted, not what I should do—and I went to Pompeii. (I should note that a bunch of other tourists and I were kicked off of the train there, as, while its display had said that it was going to Pompeii, it was not. We stood befuddled at a nearby station for awhile and then got on the correct train, which was several minutes late.)

Pompeii was a much bigger tourist draw than Herculaneum: as soon as a million other tourists and I stepped off of the train, touts started hollering at us about guided tours special deals that would let us skip lines. There was, naturally, a long line of stalls selling knick-knacks, tee-shirts, fast food, and other junk leading up to the site (as there had not been at Herculaneum), and the line-up was full of confused tourists who kept having to run to ATM machines because the tickets were, oddly, cash-only (perhaps for the sake of speed). The lines did, in fact, move quickly, and Pompeii offered free luggage storage (I think that the ticket was a few more Euros than I had been told at the information desk in Naples.). I have to admit that, once I had paid for my ticket and deposited my luggage, I felt some excitement as I approached the gate to Pompeii and saw the road leading into it that I had seen on Wikitravel (or Wikipedia).

To describe Pompeii in depth would take much more time than I can presently afford; one of my few specific remarks about it was that I immediately turned off of the main road into it because I saw something to the side that looked interesting (some ruins, that is), and I considered many of the other tourists fools for not following my example. The site is huge, much larger (or so it feels) than the historic centres of many moderately sized tourist destinations, such as Angers or, say, Rouen. It has some wonderfully preserved rooms; architects (architectural archaeologists?) have worked very hard to determine the differences in architectural approaches between different buildings and what it would say about their use, their owners’ wealth, the era in which they were built, &c., &c.; and, like in many historical sites in Italy, Pompeii had innumerable signposts with detailed information about the various buildings composing it. (I hate to give them credit for anything, but they are truly good at this. Perhaps they hire foreigners to come and put the signposts up.) I was, after two or three hours, dead beat, and I had probably only seen half of the site or so. (Pompeii immediately struck me as one of the few UNESCO World Heritage Sites unequivocally worth of the name.)

Once I had seen Pompeii, I went back to the train station and asked how to get to Salerno. The man working there said, “Different company” and impatiently waved me onward, at which point I decided to go back to Naples and use the ticket that I had originally bought (which I had been prepared to forfeit to avoid backtracking so much). I do not remember my trip to Salerno, but I was impressed, as soon as I left its train station, by its wide boulevards and pedestrian walkways. People there looked idle, but not in the jobless way of Sicilians; they were strolling, at ease, but appeared to have somewhere to go. I found my hotel quickly, got checked in, and did God knows what, for I have no memory of the rest of that evening.

Here is part 2--finally. The internet here barely works (in Dobbacio, the village in which I am staying in the Dolomites), so I do not expect to be able to send another email before I leave, but I should be able to catch up on my blog posts and send them once I am back in Bologna. The hiking trip has been a disappointment, but I am learning much more about planning such trips individually in the future.

(Edit: one of my notes reminded me that I was quite tired when I arrived in Salerno; I showered, lay down in bed, and read for a while, then I ate a makeshift dinner of canned peas and salmon. Readers of these letters will be interested to know that, for all of the twist ties, plastic utensils, napkins, and other junk that I brought back from Arkansas, I did not pack a single plastic utensil with me, as I figured that I would magically procure them once I arrived in Europe (at a cafe, or something). Since that has not since happened, and since a couple of my accommodations have not had kitchens, I have ended up eating canned food with my hands over the bathroom sink a couple of times. My first night in Salerno was one of these times. It was not my proudest moment.)

I expect that I was very excited to see Paestum and made it my first day-trip from Salerno; that is, I expect that I went immediately, without a day of rest to get acclimated to the city. I recall arriving at the train station, not immediately knowing which way to go, and then quickly finding my way, and I remember getting to the archaelogical park and seeing some of the ruins. I am sure that I was duly impressed and that I enjoyed getting to see the layout of a Greek city. I would like to imagine that it was mostly empty (it was) and that the breeze soughed through the trees (it may have). I remember the heat and the lizards. The temples themselves stand out in my memory. I have no idea what I thought of that day.

I do know, however, that I found a good delicatessen near my hotel and, later, an excellent fruit and vegetable market, where I gorged myself on loquats and, if my memory serves, passable cherries and apricots. My researches into Italians’ culinary preferences have suggested that they like smoked and cured meats, all manner of cheeses (perhaps harder, drier, saltier cheeses than the French, but I am clutching at potential distinctions here), and hard, crusty (hardy but barely sufferable) bread. I abstained from eating out in Salerno, probably because I did not know where to do so and could not find any decently priced places, but I did give in and have some sweets on my last day there. The first of the two pastries that I ate was amazing—it turns out that one appreciates pastries a lot more when one has not had them in ages—but I cannot, for the life of me, remember what it was. The second was one of the country’s famed “canoli,” with candied pecans on the outside and a filling flavored with peanut butter; it gave me immediate atherosclerosis. I had some ice cream later on, seeing as I was letting myself go, and discovered that it tasted like ice cream.

Italian pastries are varied and delicious. They heavily feature shortbread bases with various fillings (including custard, which I have not, foolishly, had since I got here), often thick marmalade. They have lighter, flakier pastries made out of something like filo dough, and they make rum babas, Napolean cake (which I have also, again foolishly, not tried), and sweetened, bready dough twisted in on itself with various fillings, another Gallic dessert. (They also, as I have probably mentioned, make shortbread cookies with almonds heavily integrated, either as part of the dough, or as sort of an outer crust.) They make little butter tarts, fancier French tea cakes (the airy kind that look like they are half made of gelatin), and… God knows what else. I wish that I could list all of the types of sweets that they make here, and I especially wish that I could truthfully claim to have tried them all.

I expect that my second day in Salerno was the one that I took to do regular stuff. I had discovered, the previous day, that Salerno was the first city with a full-on waterfront, which included walkways, bike paths, and even a free water fountain, the first that I had found in Italy. (I mean walkways and bike paths that were entirely devoid of cars. The waterfront gave onto the dock, which ejected me back into Italy proper, but for a few kilometers, I was insulated from it.) On my second day, I decided to go to the gym (I think). I was first told, when I went there, that my first visit would be free, and I almost decided to work out then and there, in my everyday clothes, as the deal seemed too good to be true. I went away, though, and when I got back, I was told that it would cost five Euros, just as the hotel manager had told me. I had no objection to paying for it, but I mentioned what I had been told earlier. The man working there asked me who it was, and I tried to describe him. “Ah,” he said after a moment; “That was Ernesto.” He nodded knowingly, as one does when one understands who is being described based on his behavior, and I burst out laughing.

The gym itself sent me back forty years. While it was the only place that I had visited, having seen someone smoking in the deli and in the hotel, in which I had not seen anyone smoking, there was an ash tray, not empty, at the front desk. The gym itself consisted of a bathroom, a couple of change rooms (I think), a studio (with exercise balls, mats, room for classes, &c.), and a weight room. The dumbbells’ weights were unmarked, but one could make sure that they were the same weight by comparing the sizes of the individual circular weights attached to them. There were a few treadmills, bikes, and machines, one of which was broken (I would like to make fun of Italians here, but every gym in every country has a broken machine.). The only people in the gym were a couple of middle-aged women, one of whom stood in a corner sedulously chewing gum and sending text messages the whole time; a man in a trainer’s shirt who looked like he had never lifted a weight; and an oiled-up homosexual, who was in better shape than I was and appeared to be trying to help the woman in the corner work out. (I wish that I could continue this caricature, but I have run out of things to say. My workout felt good. I was not in good physical shape.)

My other interesting story is of trying to find the tourist information center. (I stepped away from this letter for a few days and have just now returned to it with bad news: my trip to the tourist information center was not actually that interesting. I do not know what I was thinking when I originally called it interesting, but I will try to flesh it out in this paragraph.) Carefully following the route indicated on my map, I made it to an anonymous-looking office building, found the tourist office’s address, climbed to the third floor, and was told, in some or another terms, that I had found some sort of provincial tourism office that had nothing to do with foreign tourists looking to explore the immediate area; I was redirected to a different part of town, which I did not visit for another day or two. When I got to the tourist information center proper, a very pretty young woman helped me, speaking French with an adorable accent (as her English, she said, was not so good). She gave me schedules for the buses and ferries along the Amalfi Coast and discussed possible combinations of the two with me. In the end, I decided to skip Capri (to save money) and take buses along the Amalfi Coast. (The interesting part is coming; do not worry.) I think that my reason for calling this interesting was that, after all of our discussion of modes of transport, the person helping me got up and, beaming, gave me a calendar of Campania and another one of tourist spots in Italy as a present. Little interactions like this are just as interesting, I should think, as tourist destinations themselves.

Again, I will have to rush this, as I am about to go to Verona and still have roughly two weeks of my trip to describe—for want of time, my glory days of blogging, when I could write about my travels for hours, are, frustratingly, long behind me. (I know to schedule more time to write in the future.) The churches in Campania are queer: many of their roofs have what looks almost like a glaze, the kind that one would find on fine china, with very elaborate coloring. They have much better voices than the churches farther south—I have finally gotten to hear some church bells here. Buskers often hop onto to trains here, and one or two people often give them a little something. I have also seen a lot of canvassers, which, to my mind, shows that people in this part of the country have heard of civic duty and want to exercise it. I have probably already mentioned that the behavior of people’s dogs here reflects their own antipathies: dogs’ owners pull them away whenever they try to interact, even if their tails are wagging furiously and they clearly just want to play, and dogs often end up fighting when they do interact, as they have never been taught to do otherwise (or have been taught to be outwardly aggressive, like, I daresay, Italians themselves).

It appears that I have only the Amalfi Coast itself to describe before I can send this email. (I will try to describe this quickly, as I really want to go to bed.) The bus to Amalfi was chock full. A bunch of young blades headed to the beach engaged me in conversation with the help of a lady in front of them, who translated for me. I drank a small carton of milk and spilled some of it on myself. The trip did not get that interesting until we were a few kilometers away from Salerno, when the young people left and the bus grew a little less crowded. (One’s memory of these trips, sadly, fades with time.) One strong memory of my trip along the Amalfi Coast was of the water’s seeming to dissolve in white mist at the skyline—nothing interrupted its passage to the horizon. The cliffs that dropped into the sea were sometimes sheer, at other times sloping, big chunks of them sticking out like giants’ teeth. There were citrus trees everywhere—it struck me that the people living on the Amalfi Coast must have been dirt-poor farmers before the area became a tourist attraction—and the road was so narrow that buses had to honk their horns at each bend, for it curved sharply, and there was no way to see around many turns. The beaches looked more or less ideal for sunbathing; while I did not swim, as I was not dressed appropriately and had nowhere to put my stuff, I stepped, symbolically, into the Tyrrhenian Sea, if I have my geography right; and the hills would have made for wondrous hiking in a country that had road laws, trails, and markers on those trails. Amalfi had a pleasant-looking cathedral and another of those queer, seemingly glazed churches, but the waterfront itself was a chaotic mess of people, cars, and buses. Positano’s hills were, like Amalfi’s, dotted with white houses and heavily forested, and its water was so clear that one could see its bedrock close to the shore.

I will make this my last lament at not having enough time to write about my travels. The value of travelling is greatly diminished when one has not time to write about it, which has taught me to schedule days specifically for writing (and working out) on future trips. I will be constrained, for the rest of this trip, to share my general impressions of the places that I have visited without the accompanying narratives of what I have done each day; almost as a writing exercise, I will have to condense all of the ‘I went there and did this, then I went there and did that’ kind of narration into pithy embodiments of place. I have found that the further I fell behind in my blog, the more I have come to leave off working on my letters, as they have come to seem like a bit of a chore. I find ways to distract myself, unwind, and get caught up enough in planning future trips, after which I grow tired and put off writing for another day.

I have noticed, in almost every place that I have visited, that one could potentially spend much more time there than I have done. In Campania, I skipped some local caves (the one attraction mentioned in the tourist information that the hotel owner in Salerno gave me) and the Reggia di Caserta, a famous 17th- or 18th-century palace north of Naples, and I skipped Capri, Ischia, and Sorrento for want of time and money. (I have already mentioned everything in Apulia that I will be skipping; there is something pleasant about getting a taste of a country, accepting that you cannot see all of it, and moving on.) Men’s coiffures here are fancier than women’s. Salerno has a free public restroom, the first, I believe, that I have seen in Italy, and it has free water fountains, which were to become a theme in the north of the country. I made a note of the transport system, which has remained a little enigmatic to me, as it was fairly good (my note simply reads: “transport here”), and I noted the religious parade that I saw on my last day there. When I heard drums and shouting outside, I expected some sort of a protest or gathering of youth. What I saw instead was row after row of people proceeding solemnly with images of the Virgin Mary and crosses—they looked as serious as though they were walking toward their death. I would have found the whole thing funny if it were not for the profusion of children, all with faces just as serious as the adults, in the parade, many of them holding banners and helpless to resist the propaganda being fed to them.

That concluded my trip to Salerno, during which I was told that, unlike with some of my other rail tickets, I would not need to print out my e-ticket for Rome, as it had a unique registration number that the ticket collector could look up. (Edit: it was probably not an e-ticket, but some other type of ticket.) The ticket system here is confusing: while one can make bookings online, one cannot print out tickets at the machines, as one does at the airport, because that system has not yet been put into place. Instead, one has to ask one of the rail employees to print the ticket out itself, effectively nullifying the value of one’s having an e-ticket beyond its ensuring that one get a seat. Rail employees often look askance at one’s reservations, however, and one does not trust the information that they gave one. Luckily for me, they were right that whatever kind of reservation I had for Rome did not require a standard, laminated ticket. I have just killed the suspense that I might have built up about my possibly not having been able to get to Rome.