Traveling Johns

Although the boat was supposed to dock at a few minutes after six, I was up at least an hour before that. I caught this glimpse of the rising sun. 

There is a kennel on the ship for dogs being transported to Sicily, and the dogs and their friends were reunited in the early morning light. 

We took our time disembarking from the boat, which annoyed crew somewhat, and caught a cab. We arrived at our hotel, the wonderfully named Palazzo Brunaccini, in a few minutes. Since it was barely eight o’clock, it was no surprise that our room was not ready yet. We asked if there was a barber nearby. Salvatore, one of the workers there, walked us a couple blocks away to the small “Fabio” salon. We mimed enough information for me to get my hair trimmed quite nicely. Unfortunately, I did not get a picture of this. 

From there we went on to one of the many markets in Palermo, the Ballarò market. It was still a little early for this and many of the vendors were still starting to put our their wares. There is a fantastic amount of fresh fish here. Frankly, it leaves the Pikes Place market in Seattle in the dust here.

There were things I have never seen at home like these giant zucchini.

 And there were some things I am not sure I want to know more about. I’m guessing these we salt water eels.

We stopped friendly at a small church in the market. All of the pills were draped with faux silk was was the altar itself. 

 The church was dedicated to Saint Francis, so his image was given pride of place … a bit of neon, too!

We still had an hour or two before we could check in at the hotel, so we decided to do more sightseeing. At the top of nearly everybody’s list of sights in Palermo is the Palazzo dei Normanni, the Norman castle. It is not, as the guidebooks all point out, a particularly interesting place from the outside. It was built as fortifications in the twelfth century, after all. It is what is inside that is important. And there are two things that are worth visiting inside:  the Royal Apartment and the Palatine Chapel.

Alas, the first of those two places was not open today. The Palazzo is the home of the Sicilian Assembly, the closest thing in Italy to an American state government. For security reasons, when the assembly is meeting access to the building is restricted. So had to content ourselves with the chapel. Still, what a glorious place this is! It possibly contains the most magnificent Byzantine mosaics in Italy. They are nowhere as old, of course, as the ones in Ravenna, but they give the sense of what such a church should look like. Here is the Christos Pantokrator, the “All-Ruling Christ” in the apse above the high altar. Note that Jesus has a beard and long hair here just like a Norman noble:  in the earlier mosaics in Ravenna he is clean shaven with short hair as a Roman would have been. 

In the back is an elevated area where King Roger I who built that chapel may have sat during Mass. 

 Restoration of the chapel is an on-going job. The chapel was built by an eclectic group of architects and artisans including Arabs. These artists used traditional Islamic geometric patterns in the tile work. 

As we left, I noticed from the guidebook at San Giovanni degli Eremeti was on the way back. We stopped by this ruined monastery, one of the very oldest in Sicily. There is really not much left here, at the red domes, the most famous feature of the church, may or may not be authentic. There are bits of what could be a splendid garden in the old cloisters. 

I tried to point out to John that we are too old for selfies, but he insists on trying.

Nobody over the age of 40 should have a close up or a photo shot from below their chin. Or, in my case, chins!

We also briefly stopped by the Duomo, or cathedral. It is an enormous building and the exterior is a hodgepodge of Arabic, Byzantine, Gothic, and neoclassical styles. It still manages to look sort of interesting. The interior is beyond drab, possibly the worst of eighteenth century church design. On the outside there was this strange carriage. I have no idea what this is all about. Maybe it’s religious, or maybe it’s some kind of public art. 

Making it back to the hotel, we check in an discovered that they had given us a truly enormous room, a suite with a sitting area as well as a bedroom. Rebecca would have liked this place a lot! I am not sure why we received this obvious upgrade, but I’m not complaining about it!

We napped a bit and then went exploring in the neighborhood. Palermo seems poorer even than Naples, and we were struck by how many African immigrants are living here as well as a sizable number of Muslims. Most of the centro storico is still in poor condition, although here and there building have been restored. There are an utterly absurd number of churches here, even accepting that the population of this area a century ago was much higher than it is today. Still a few were intriguing. This is Saint Cataldo the church of the Knights of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, one of the Roman Catholic “military” orders dating from the time of the Crusades. It was not clear how exactly one could tour this church, so we never made it inside. 

Instead, we look at the Fontana Pretoria. This fountain dominates the square in front of Palermo’s city hall. Built in the sixteenth century by a Florentine sculpture, it shocked conservative Palermo. It was called the Fontana della Vergogna, or “Fountain of Shame.” It does have a few pretty risqué elements to it. 

We looked in our guidebooks for a good place for lunch and finally hit upon Zia Pina, or “Aunt Pina’s” a small trattoria close to the old port area. The food was quite good, and quite cheap, too! John loved the antipasto bar. As we left, though we went through some of the poorest areas we have seen yet in Palermo. In a nearby square, the graffiti pointed out that the buildings there have no been rebuilt from the Allied bombing in 1943!

As we were shaking out heads at this, we noticed another man walk up with large plastic jugs to fill from the fountain. We figured that he must not have running water where he lives. This seemed straight out of one of those post-war Italian neo-realist movies.

On a lighter note, we noticed that across the street somebody else had declared their love for Uwe, Since we have a friend by this name in Los Angeles, we thought we would let him know that he might have an admirer in Palermo.

In the evening we walked over to the Teatro Massimo to see if we could get tickets to the ballet. When we look at this online a few weeks ago it was sold out. But we decided to see if either there had been cancellations or if more seats had been released. I’m not sure which it was, but we bought two tickets for a very reasonable 45 euro each. We noticed the colors on the front of the building and wondered if this had anything to do with upcoming Gay Pride weekend in Palermo. 

The Massimo is another of the grand old European opera houses. It was built almost 70 years after the new San Carlo in Naples, but it looks pretty similar. 

It does have a bigger and better lobby than some of the earlier Opera houses. 

We were seated on the top row of the boxes, but in back. We were there to see not opera but ballet. In this case it was a new production of Delibe’s Coppelia. As nobody was seated behind us, John discretely took some pictures of the production with his phone.

After the production, John went to the Royal box. I am not sure if the reigning monarchs of the House of Savoy ever left Rome or Milan to come down here, but if they did, they certainly had a grand place to watch opera. 

We had a lovely small supper at on a square in the old section and then headed back to the hotel.

 Tomorrow we are going to try to make it to Monreale.

This morning, with the melodies of Rossini still in our heads, we came to the beginning of our last day in Naples. The Art Hotel is wonderfully located, but after Ravello it seemed so small and a bit dark. And it was not easy getting cleaned up with three people and one bathroom! We had the usual buffet breakfast and then we packed up. Rebecca was not scheduled to leave for the airport until about noon, so we had the morning to explore. I checked out, and we left our luggage with the desk.

I had the great idea that we should go up to Castel Sant’Elmo and take pictures of the city. We knew that there was some kind of funicular that led there and we figured that it should not be too hard to find. We went off walking in the general direction of the the castles, and I was certain we would find the funicular on the way. Well, I was wrong! All we did was walk through some occasionally interesting neighborhoods in the so-called Spanish Quarter. Each street seemed to climb a bit and even when I asked for directions to the funicular the answers — in Italian — were so complicated we seemed to get more and more lost. To make things worse, John was not feeling well, and Rebecca’s phone was pinging with emails and texts about things going wrong at work in Antwerp. We finally gave up and walked back to the the hotel.

We had a coffee, some farewells, and we negotiated getting a taxi to to the airport for Rebecca. We were sorry to see her go. 

John and I still had about a full day left in Naples, so we went wandering about. And it was right we found the funicular. It was right next to our hotel, and we had walked past the entrance to the place at least half a dozen times! But there is a good reason we never saw this funicular. Most funiculars, like Angel’s Flight in Los Angeles, are on the sides of hills. The Naples funiculars — it turns out that there are three of them — are actually tunneled into the hills. They are sort subways angled up the sides of hills. All you can see is the entrance, exactly like a subway. We bought tickets and in a few minutes we were going up the hill. 

When we walked out of the funicular into the Vomero neighborhood it was like we were in a different world. This is middle class Naples. There is some trash and graffiti, of course — we are still in Italy — but you can immediately tell that this is a prosperous area. It reminded both of us of the neighborhood where we stayed when we were in Rome. The neighborhood is dominated by the Castel Sant’Elmo. For those of you raised on Sesame Street, Elmo is not a saint. It is a Neapolitan corruption of Erasmus, or Erasmo in Spanish. The fort was established by the Spanish kings after Naples was annexed to the House of Bourbon. Today it is an arts center, though the fortifications are still sort of impressive. 

From the parapets there are astonishing views of the city and the entire Bay of Naples. There is the Galleria where our hotel was located and the opera house just to the right of it. 

We saw many other “old friends” from up here, including the Duomo. I am really adoring the telephoto lens on the camera my students gave me at the end of this year!

We also saw the commercial heart of a new Naples, a neighborhood we have not visited. Ah well, another time. 

As this place is used for a great many arts events — the Naples Theater Festival was taking place there this week — it provides a backdrop for photos and selfies. John decided to snap this one. It almost looks real, doesn’t it?

There is a small museum displaying the work of twentieth century Neapolitan artists. Most of it seemed pretty similar to works of the same period just about every place else. But a couple pieces caught our eyes. The first was this painting of people in a funicular.

And John is always a sucker for pictures of the proletariat rebelling, particularly this piece which could have been the inspiration for Bertolucci’s 1900.

Our next stop of the day was the Certosa di San Martino, Saint Martin’s Charterhouse. For those of you not up on your Roman Catholic monastic orders, a charterhouse signifies a monastery of of the Carthusian order. No doubt when the monks first established this retreat, they were more concerned with isolation from the world than with stunning views. Nevertheless, the monastery does offer panoramic views of the entire Bay of Naples.

Sunday morning John woke up quite early and went off for a walk. I slept in for about an hour, and then decided as it was Sunday I should go to Mass at the Cathedral. As I arrived in the La Piazza del Duomo, the cathedral square, I found John sitting at a table in a cafe there. The town was bathed in a sweet yellow light. 

John asked if he could join me for Mass, and I said I had no objection to this. The early Mass was held in a side chapel, and I was quite surprised by how much of the Italian I could follow. Not the sermon, of course, but most of the small congregation present did not seem to be paying much attention to this either. John stayed for the first part of the service, and after Mass was over I found him in the nave of the cathedral looking at its many artistic and historical treasures. During the heyday of the Duchy of Amalfi in the tenth and eleventh centuries, Ravello was a rich and important wool production and trading center. The bishops of had the money to commission some impressive works of art like the Byzantine-style epistle pulpit

and this grand gospel pulpit. 

Not only is the mosaic work impressive, but the six lions supporting the pulpit are also astonishing — and rather charming, too!

All Italian cities have some patron saint, and for Ravello it is Saint Pantaleone the Healer. According to the story, Pantaleone was a physician who was beheaded by the Emperor Diocletian at the end of the third century. 

Just as Naples as the blood of Saint Januarius, Ravello has Pantaleone’s blood. And it too is said to liquify on his feast day, July 27th.  There are so many reasons to visit Ravello in the summer! 

We returned to the hotel and Rebecca had left for one last Vespa ride. When she returned, we packed up and waited for the taxi to take us to Naples. And with all this magnificent scenery, why exactly was I looking at my phone? New habits are hard to break, I guess.

We took the road over the Latari mountains. Along the way we saw a bit of the old Italy. 

We had a fairly long ride into Naples. There seemed to be some kind of police activity and we were stuck in traffic barely moving for about thirty minutes. Of course, as it being Naples, absolutely everybody, including a nun in a car in the next lane, had to honk endlessly. Our hotel here is one frequently recommended in guidebooks, the Art Hotel. It is located in the Gallery Umberto, a nineteenth century shopping mall that looks exactly like the Galleria in Milan. And, also like the Galleria, it is undergoing an extensive and no doubt expensive renovation. It will be stunning again when finished. 

The hotel occupies one wing of the top floor. These were offices at one time. We just unpacked and decided to show Rebecca lively city that John and I had learned to love only a few days before. Except … it was Sunday and it was mid-day and there was almost nothing open and almost nobody to be seen on the streets. Rebecca, seeing only the graffiti and the trash, must have thought we were insane. We did amuse ourselves with some Fascist architecture

and we found an open pizza place by San Domenico Maggiore. Wandering around later, we found the pizza place we should have eaten, the one where the Pizza Margherita, Italy’s favorite pizza, was invented. 

Returning to the hotel, we cleaned ourselves up a bit in preparation for going to the Opera. One of the coolest things about the hotel is this old-fashioned elevator you need to take to get up to the fourth floor, what Americans would call the fifth floor. 

The San Carlo Opera is the oldest opera company in Europe. The original building was built in 1737, but burned to the ground in 1816. The Neopolitans, great lovers of opera, lost no time in building a new theater and the current building was dedicated in 1817. Rebecca had never had an opportunity to see a grand old European theater. She fell in love with it!

We were there to see Rossini’s La Cenerentola. This is retelling of the Cinderella story with some very strange twists. The staging by the San Carlo company seemed deliberately nineteenth century. Few, if any of the typical lighting and stage effects that are typical of modern American opera companies were employed. Indeed, the footlights were one of the dominant sources of stage light just as they would have been two hundred years ago. 

The singing was astonishingly good. The Russian tenor who played Prince Ramiro had a fantastic voice!

Italians like to begin their cultural events fairly early in the evening. Our opera here began at five o’clock. This meant it was still light when the opera was over and there was opportunity for a passeggiata, a stroll. We stopped by the Plaza of the Plebiscite and then continued on the waterfront.   

The day began with a stunning display of clouds on the hills overlooking Ravello. What a beautiful place this is! 

We all went over to the hotel nearby and had breakfast with Ann and Stephan. I discovered yesterday that I had left a notebook with all of my reservations and other essential information in some previous hotel. After calling around a bit, we learned that we had left it in Sorrento. Ann and Stephan volunteered to drive to Sorrento to get it for us. They insisted that this would be no problem — just an opportunity to give Ann a chance to see more of Italy. I asked if they would mind some company so I could spend more time with them and they readily agreed. So, just after breakfast, the three of us piled into Stephan’s Smart car and off we went.

Meanwhile, John Pratt and Rebecca walked around Ravello and bit and did some posing. 

But then, somewhat to her protective uncle’s dismay, Rebecca announced she wanted to rent a Vespa and ride around the Amalfi Coast. All John could say was “Please be careful.” As the day progressed, our telephones chimed with pictures and texts from Rebecca as she was riding around. 

I really do not want to know how she took this picture.

I would rather just concentrate on the pretty pictures she took and give thanks to my Savior that she returned alive. 

Meanwhile, back in the land of sane people, John went to look at the gardens of the Villa Rufolo. This grand old home — and by old, of course, I am talking early medieval — became some Brit’s enormous vacation cottage, and all kinds of artsy people including Richard Wagner stayed there for a while. Apparently he was so taken by the ruins on the estate that it inspired him to write a whole section of Parsifal. 

This bit of history encouraged the city fathers of Ravello to start a music festival. It was initially devoted to the music of Wagner but has since expanded its focus to all kinds of music. John found the main stage and its pretty decent location! 

He also learned that there would be a ballet version of Tristan and Isolde later this that evening and bought us all tickets for it. 

Meanwhile, Ann, Stephan, and I had a pleasant drive to Sorrento. I showed them a bit of the town and we picked up my folder from Hotel Regina. The ever-helpful Antonino suggested a restaurant by the dock, and the three of us lunch by the port.

After lunch, we came back inland route to Ravello. It was much faster. Rebecca was not yet back, so John and I went exploring. As some of you know, John will have a 34 year anniversary tomorrow and this sign reminded him of what he does not plan to do today. 

We came across a strange little church built into the cliff. It reminded me a lot of the caves of the Basilian monks we had seen last year in Puglia. At any rate, the cave was dark and the only reason you can see the paintings on the wall of this sanctuary of stone is the result of a good flash on my camera and Abode Lightroom. 

Instead of showing me the Villa Rufolo, John decided to look for the other grand home in town, the Villa Cimbrone. And we were glad we found this place. It has wonderful garden walks. 

 There are elegant small buildings

There’s a famous old British musical hall song whose chorus begins, 

Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside
I do like to be beside the sea!
I do like to stroll along the Prom, Prom, Prom!
Where the brass bands play:
“Tiddely-om-pom-pom!”

Well, we had no brass bands this morning in Positano, but we did spend a most pleasant day beside the sea. Our destination for the day was the nearby — well, in kilometers only — town of Ravello. We figured that we could spend all day trying to get there by SITA bus, or just pay a few Euros more and take a taxi. That gave us the opportunity to spend most of the day on the beach. 

Rebecca, in particular, having suffered through a long, gray Belgian winter, was quite excited to be in the warm sun and by the warm water. She contemplated taking a swim,

found her way to a rock in the harbor,

executed one of her signature jumps, 

and happily swam back to shore. 

She and John happily played in the water while your writer, having completely embraced his inner grandfather, napped beneath a beach umbrella and read a book.

But by two o’clock or so it was time for us to go. Our hotel arranged to send our luggage to a taxi and told us to wait for the taxi next to the pharmacy in town. So we took one last walk along the seaside path. 

The drive to Ravello was quite stunning. Although it was only about 25 kilometers, it took us about an hour! Ravello is slightly inland from the town of Amalfi and the road climbs and climbs until you get here.It is a hilltop town with ocean views! It does not get much better than that. The taxi took us to our home for the next two days, an apartment with the so-Italian name of “La Dolce Vita.” We have a kitchen with a small dining area, two small bedrooms, each with a bath, and from everywhere we have a view! This what the world looks like from the kitchen window!

Down in the valley below there are many small medieval villages. 

My friends Ann and Stefan emailed me a couple days ago to tell us that they were staying with his family in Puglia. That is not exactly close, but they insisted on coming to Ravello to meet up with us. When they arrived, Ann called me to let me know they were there. I stepped outside to get slightly better reception … and saw them on the balcony of a hotel about 500 feet away!

We all went out to dinner together. I was really having a much better than than it appears in this photograph!

The owner of this restaurant is somewhat famous. Supposedly Rosie O’Donnell was so taken by her cooking that she asked her to appear on her show, but the old woman declined to leave Ravello. Whether it’s true or not she certainly is a character. When I asked for a picture she was more than happy to oblige!

Ravello bills itself a “la città della musica,” the city of music. There is a big summer music festival here which draws famous performers from around the world. Before we left Los Angeles, I had made arrangements to get tickets to a chamber music performance. The performers were a group called the Martucci Piano Trio and they did works by Haydn, Beethoven, and Schumann. 

John and Rebecca really did enjoy the concert, but they could not resist pretending to be bored. 

We went home feeling quite cultured.

When I was growing up, my brother’s friend Richard hated doing boring things with his relatives. He always complained about having to go on “aunt and uncle” rides at Cedar Point and playing “aunt and uncle” board games with his family. Rebecca had a bit of an “aunt and uncle” day on the Amalfi Coast with her two uncles. This is an extraordinarily lovely part of the world, but also sort of boring as well. 

After breakfast this morning we went for a walk around Sorrento. What had seemed charming late in the evening seemed oppressively crowded this morning. There were just too many tourists! But we did find a few locals. We came across this wedding.

The ceremony had just taken place in the cloisters of former Franciscan monastery, now used as an civic arts center. Somebody had placed these megaliths there, and they looked to me like mutant prairie dogs. I am not sure I would have wanted them at my wedding!

John and I stopped in the nearby church while Rebecca, who has no patience for this sort of thing, shopped outside. Saint Anthony of Egypt is the patron saint of Sorrento and we had read that his relics were inside. Being a good Catholic boy, I knew to make a beeline for the crypt underneath the high altar. I am not exactly sure what part of the famed desert father is supposedly preserved there.

Meanwhile, Rebecca found herself another tasteful scarf. We all decided that maybe we had “done” Sorrento and it was time to move on to our next town.

Along the way the urge to pose was somewhat irresistible.

We all went back and forth about how to get to Positano, and figured that for the three of us it probably would not be much more to hire a cab than to deal with the infamous SITA bus. Antonino — named, as he proudly told us, for the gentleman whose bones were preserved in the previous photograph — was only to happy to arrange it. We did have to wait a few minutes, and John and Rebecca passed the time as all modern people do … on their phones.

The Amalfi Coast is a famously beautiful ride along a windy, narrow, two-lane road. We did not find it quite as nail-bitingly scary as most tourists do, but then all of us have driven down Mulholland Drive and through Big Sur many times. Just before coming into Positano we stopped for pictures. John is not crazy about selfies, but Rebecca insisted. 

In a somewhat less self-referential moment, Rebecca also found a dog

who seemed to specialize in posing for pictures against this stunning backdrop. 

The Catholic boy, of course, was fascinated by this statue of the Virgin of Lourdes. The plaque indicated her appearance to somebody in Positano was her 150th apparition. I guess everybody comes to this part of the world for vacation….

In a short time we were at the Hotel Pupetto. No, actually we were near it. To get from the road to the hotel you have to descend about 200 steps, although you do have the option of taking an elevator at one point and skipping about half of the climb down. John, famously prone to motion sickness, had taken some dramamine before our car ride, and he was not feeling like climbing a lot of stairs. So we took the elevator.

The Hotel Pupetto seems straight out of some Fellini movie. It looks like somebody ought to turn the corner at any time crying, “Marcello, Marcello.” Alas, listening as we walked through the restaurant, English-speaking tourists seemed to predominate. Our room has a nice view with a sweet little balcony. 

The two Pratts were definitely ready for lunch, so we went down to the restaurant. John ordered the daily fish, and was relieved when our waiter expertly filleted it for him, 

Mediterranean beaches are not generally not that large and mostly are made of gravel. Nobody in California or Australia would want to spend an afternoon on them. But Europeans are understandably desperate for some sunshine and a bit of warm water, so they love them. And they all require you to rent a chaise longue and an umbrella. Fortunately, as we were staying at the hotel, we received ours for free. Everybody pulled out their Kindles and read for a bit, but before long at least two of your travelers were fast asleep.

In the evening we went into town. We took a footpath along the edge of the shore. I stopped to admire the colors and geometrical precision of the main beach. 

As soon as we hit the first shop, John and Rebecca went shopping for hats. I stayed outside where I found a friend who seemed to share my retail pain. 

Positano is sort of like Carmel, an upscale, open-air shopping mall adjacent to the water. There are lovely pathways that lead from one level of shopping to the next. 

Rebecca and John wanted to have something to eat, and John pulled out his guidebook and found a place called Bruno’s that Rick Steves had recommended. It was near dusk, and the all the tables were full. I think that they had trouble turning down a lovely signorina like Rebecca, so the waiters made two guys move and gave us their table! The restaurant had a fabulous location

and a stunning view of the Positano as night fell.

The food wasn’t bad, either! Tomorrow, it’s off to our last Amalfi Coast stop, Ravello.

Our day started with a bang — quite literally! When we awoke we heard thunder, and before long the skies opened up and it poured about as intensely as I have ever seen it rain. Fortunately, we had scheduled nothing but breakfast for first thing in the morning, and by the time we were ready to check out of our hotel the thunderstorm departed about as quickly as it had arrived. 

Our first stop of the day was the Naples National Archeology Museum. It was close to a mile away, but we decided to walk there to get better sense of some of the other sights in central Naples. Only a few feet from out hotel we stumbled upon yet another famous church, Santa Chiara, the historic monastery of the Poor Clares. As befits its Franciscan heritage, it is a remarkably austere structure still preserving the essential Gothic elements of the original building. 

A later campanile provides a bit of Renaissance flavor. 

I guess these were the relics of some saint or another, but I could not find anything that particularly explained it to me. John told me that many of you like stuff like relics, though, so I thought I would include the picture anyhow. 

It was bright and sunny when we finally reached the museum. The places has an interesting history. It started life as a palace, then became cavalry barracks. For a time it served as the offices and classrooms for the University of Naples. Finally, in the late eighteenth century, King Charles VIII of Naples, a Bourbon,  turned it into a museum to house all the art he had inherited from his mother, a member of the famous Roman Farnese family. To this day many of the highlights of the museum come from that original Farnese collection. There is this iconic sculpture of Hercules resting from his labors, a Roman marble copy of a Greek bronze. 

In his hand he holds the three golden apples he had stolen from Zeus.

There is also the “Farnese Bull,” a massive tableau that depicts the murder of Dirce at the hands of her nephews. Euripides tells the story in his play Antiope if you need more details.  

Shortly after Charles established this museum to house his treasures – and keep his relatives hands off them – the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum began. This is the reason that most visitors come to this museum. Just about everything they could find at those sites that could be pulled off a floor or a wall ended up here. There is this famous picture of Dionysus by a mountain that many assume to be Vesuvius. 

The technical mastery of the first-century Roman painters really impressed John. 

There are stunning mosaics from these ancient villas here as well. 

The enlightened aristocrats of the eighteenth century generally had regarded Rome as a fairly high-minded place of philosophers and poets, so the discovery of huge amounts of erotic paintings and sculptures rather shocked them. They had to collect it, of course, but for two centuries all of this comprised the “Gabinetto Segreto” or “secret room” of the museum. Even until the 1970s visitors needed to apply to see this material. Only around the turn of this century did it become just another part of the museum. And some of the pieces, such as this sculpture of Pan with a goat, can still shock us!

We took a cab back to our hotel hotel and another one down to the harbor. Our destination for today was Sorrento. Many tourists get to Sorrento by taking the Transvesuviana train, but our guidebooks suggested that taking a ferry was not only safer and faster but far prettier, too. We discovered that Naples manages to have a fairly handsome port. 

Just after we boarded, John asked some young English guy with an upper-crust accent and and a Morgan Stanley gym bag – no, I didn’t make up that detail – to take our picture. 

As our boat pulled away from the dock we were aware of all the places we have not seen yet. 

I noticed the many boats from the Italian Coast Guard there. In recent days they have been rescuing thousands of African migrants at sea. I wondered if they were about to do the same today.

Along the way we saw stunning vistas of Mount Vesuvius. It seems so peaceful in these pictures. 

But, as you can see from this shot of its caldera, it is still an active volcano and has erupted many times since the famous eruption that buried Pompeii. 

After this lovely forty minute ride we arrived in Sorrento. This lovely town is just on south end of the Bay of Naples. It seems like a world away from the frenetic pace of the city. 

We are staying a the Hotel Regina. There is an amazing view of the city from its rooftop. That is Mount Vesuvius behind me. I think it was from here that Pliny the Younger documented the eruption in 79 CE. 

It is a tourist town, and a place for well-to-do tourists in particular. And, as the current mayor of New York knows, well-to-do tourists love to ride in horse-drawn carriages. 

We had made arrangements for Rebecca, John’s niece, to join us on this part of the trip. She is living and working in Antwerp these days. She was originally supposed to arrive at Naples by air and then take a bus to Sorrento. But the flight was delayed and she missed her bus, the last of the day. Antonino, our helpful desk clerk, arranged for private transport. The moment she arrived we wished her off to the “Sorrento Musical” at the Teatro Tasso in the center of town. I knew from the reviews on TripAdvisor that this would be pretty hokey, but sort of fun review of Neapolitan songs and dances. It proved to be exactly that. 

Like any of these kinds of cruise ship shows, there had to be people plucked out of the audience for participation. And you can guess who was only to eager to become part of the show!

Leaving Capodichino airport, our taxi driver nearly ran another car off the road. He shouted something after the driver, flipped him the finger, and then proceeded to drive wildly onto the autostrade. I turned to John and smiled. “Benvenuto a Napoli. We’re definitely in Naples now.” 

One guidebook I read described this city as “Italy on steroids.” Many tourists tend to avoid the city altogether, and when we found ourselves in Naples for the first time thirty years ago, we were so struck by the crowds, the filth, and the poverty that we could not get out of it fast enough. But I knew that this was once one of the great capitals of Europe and that there were magnificent churches and museums here. So when John suggested that we return to Italy this summer I told him that I definitely wanted to spend some time in Naples. And so here we find ourselves on the western slope of Mount Vesuvius at the edge of the Tyrrhenian Sea. 

Naples is an old city, but its name comes from two Greek words, Nea Polis or “New City.” In the last decades of the Bronze Age the Greeks aggressively established colonies in what is today southern Italy and Sicily. Their initial settlement in this area was called Parthenope, named after the Siren who supposedly drowned herself in the sea after she failed to seduce Ulysses. Etruscans from central Italy later struggled with the Greeks for control of this area, and this apparently led to establishing Nea Polis sometime in the sixth century BCE as a more defensible city.

Obviously there is a lot of history that took place between that time and now, and now Naples does not seem like an New City at all! There were invasions and conquests by the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Visigoths, the Saracens, the Normans, the Spanish…. The list goes on and on. But more on any of this when and if it comes up. 

We are staying at a place called the Decumani Hotel de Charme. All the guidebooks seem to like it, and the location cannot be beat. It’s in some old palazzo that they are slowly restoring, and some of the public rooms are great. This is the breakfast room.

Our room, however, is nothing particular to crow about. It’s somewhat spartan and not particularly large. The only windows are two doors facing a rather ugly interior court yard.

I went out to look at it while John snapped this artsy shot.

So, not being inclined to spend too much time in it, John and I went exploring. Now John often as we are wandering about European cities complains about visiting so many churches, but in Naples that is where so much of the art is that even he was interested in checking out almost every one. We stopped first at Sant’Angelo a Nilo, the site of a famous funerary monument, but the most interesting parts of the church were closed. So we went on to San Domenico Maggiore. 

This church, named for Saint Dominic, was the first site of the University of Naples, and after leaving Paris, Thomas Aquinas returned to southern Italy to teach theology here. And it was in a chapel in this church towards the end of his life that he had a famous vision. We were in that chapel, but so were several friars and a couple visiting nuns so we could not get away with taking any pictures. The nave of the church was fairly empty, so we brazenly ignored all the signs showing a large red X over a drawing of a camera. This is the high altar and the choir behind it. The church was originally built in a simple Norman Gothic style as you can see from the vaulted ceiling. But Baroque artists did their best to decorate it in their new, exuberant style as you can see. 

The ceiling of the nave is features a suspended Renaissance wooden to hide the vaulting there. We found the front facing camera on the phone just perfect for taking these kinds of pictures.

One of the most interesting things in the church was the remains of a “forty hour machine,” a special altar designed for Eucharistic devotion. 

We went on from there to San Lorenzo Maggiore, the headquarters of the Franciscan Friars in Naples. This is a pretty stark and uninteresting Gothic structure. The were one or two things worthy of a photograph here, but there were a couple women who were enforcing the photography ban with near military fervor. So, dear reader, you will have to check with Google on that one if you wish.

Grafitti was invented in Italy – or at least the word was – and it is ubiquitous in Naples. It is hard to find any building whose first floor exterior is not covered in spray paint of some kind. For me, and I suspect for most Americans, it is discouraging to see handsome old buildings defaced in this way. But it apparently does not bother the Neapolitans that much.

A great deal of it appears to be political

and some of it is even rather fascinating.

The wonderful thing about Naples is how life seems to be lived out on the streets. All the streets in the historic center are quite narrow, and most are not much larger than alleys. The maze of dark interior streets seems more like a North African souk than anything in Rome or Turin. But a chance look will bring a surprising glimpse of an old church

or of some African sisters of Mother Theresa’s order.

The obsession that northern Italians seem to have with dressing up and looking fashionable — “fare una bella figura — seems rather absent here. Neapolitans present themselves to the world as they are.

There is also laundry drying everywhere. Everybody in Naples knows what your sheets are like, and apparently the more colorful they are the better!

There are many odd little monuments to be found on the streets such as this tribute to Punchinella, the commedia dell’arte character who is also stock figure in Neapolitan puppetry.

John loves commedia dell’arte!

As in other Roman Catholic countries, street shrines are fairly common. 

What I found somewhat unusual in Naples was the addition of neon. 

Everywhere there are shops and stalls and carts selling things. Only in Bangkok have I ever seen such abundance and variety of street food. We stopped to buy a sfogliatella, the famous Neapolitan pastry whose many thin layers are filled with sweet, almond-flavored ricotta.

Our next stop on the historic church circuit was the basilica of San Paolo Maggiore. Legend has it that both Peter and Paul preached in Naples on their way to martyrdom in Rome. This church was built on the site of a Roman temple to Castor and Pollux and some of the pediment of the old temple was visible there until an earthquake in the eighteenth century toppled it for good. The interior is Baroque, and one of the things about Italy is how quickly these extraordinary interiors soon seem commonplace. 

The most important thing for locals at this church is the shrine to Saint Cajetan, the founder of the Theatine order. In Italian he is known as San Gaetano. All the faithful were upstairs at the evening Mass, so I had the opportunity to snap this surreptitious shot. 

From there we wandered down Spaccanapoli or “Naples Divider” street. Like all the streets in the historic center it is not wide, but unlike all the others it is remarkably straight. There are all kinds of interesting shops here. John was for some reason taken with this bridal place. 

As we drew closer to the Duomo or Cathedral we went down the Via San Gregorio Armeno, famous for its artisans who make a of carving nativity scenes. 

The detail in these nativity scenes is amazing!

 Our final ecclesiastical destination was the Duomo di Napoli, the cathedral of Naples.

The interior is being renovated, and scaffolding and construction materials were everywhere in the nave. The high altar was clearly influenced by Saint Peter’s in Rome. 

The big attraction at the Cathedral is the blood of Saint Janarius, a third-century martyr. Alas, it only is shown to the public twice a year. But when it is displayed to the faithful it supposedly liquifies and if it fails to do so disaster will soon befall Naples. We will have to come back for that one — and perhaps have a plane ticket out for the next day! 

We stopped at a small cafe to have a salad. It was not a memorable meal, but sitting on a small piazza allowed us to engage in fascinating people watching. As night fell, we wandered back to our hotel through the maze of streets in the centro storico. 

We went exploring around Charlottesville today with Mike. He took us first to the place they had rented for a couple years about a half hour outside of town. It is on a small farm. They really did not live there all that time because Mike was working in Portland for close to a year and Ellen was in Kenya as part of her Fulbright fellowship. Their apartment – somehow both John and I failed to take a picture of it – is above the garage. It had a few of pastures and an old barn. 

John loved the barn. He has been searching for antlers for the play we are doing, and he would have walked off with this deer hunting  prop if he could have. 

It almost made him want to take up farming. 

There was a large and rather creepy building further back on the property. We think it was used to keep hunting dogs, but it is hard to be certain. 

 From her we headed up into the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah National Park. Along the road we came across a reconstruction of a pioneer homestead. 

The view as we were driving along was spectacular. 

Back on King Mountain Road I did a little work. Their sun room is such a pleasant place to pass the time.  

Later on, we went into town. Charlottesville is in the South, so there was the inevitable heroic statue of Robert E. Lee. 

We had dinner at a small restaurant. We were joined by two friends of Ellen’s from the Semester at Sea program. The woman on the bottom right – I am blanking on her name – works at Monticello and provided us with four free tickets for tomorrow. The man in the bottom right, her boyfriend, is working on his Ph.D. at UVa in Tibetan Buddhism. Both of them were really nice, nice people.

When John first set up this trip I was a little uncertain about spending five days in Washington. As we were leaving today, I felt like we could easily have spent another five more. We had a pleasant breakfast, as usual, at the Taft Bridge Inn. We have particularly enjoyed the company of Ken and Celeste, two teachers from Puyallap, Washington. 

We went down to Budget to pick up our rental car. It seemed to take a long time and get the car and even longer to get out of town, but none of this was interesting while it was happening and I cannot image retelling it will make it more fascinating. We headed off to Mount Vernon to finally see the famous estate. 

After you buy your ticket, you walk through a pretty decent museum. One of the most intriguing exhibits is about reconstructing what Washington really looked like. They have this great holograph of Washington that seems to turn and watch you as you walk around it. 

A long path leads up to the main house. 

Although made of wood, the exterior of the mansion is covered with a textured coating to make it look like stone. The docent explained to us that they threw sand on the wet paint. 

You have to wait for about 30 minutes or so to get into the house. Once you are inside, you a pushed along pretty quickly. Taking pictures is strictly prohibited, but I found a few stills on Google Images. This is the last room built in the house, a kind of trophy room. 

This is Washington’s study. Notice the foot operated fan for hot days. 

It was a long an fairly frustrating drive from Mount Vernon to Charlottesville. Once we got there, we were greeted right away by Rafiki, Ellen’s dog. Fiki is getting up in years now and has lost most of her hearing. 

They have a large house on a pretty large lot. It is quite a bit different from their Portland digs. 

There’s a nice dining room, though in real life the wall is not curved. 

There’s also this great sun room. I think it must originally have been a porch, but this makes it much more usable. 

Ellen had to go off to some University function, so Michael made us sandwiches and we went off hiking through the nearby woods. 

John was delighted by daffodils growing wild. 

And on our way home John discovered the colonial house his mother always wanted.