Our benevolent, but bumbling USAC leaders recently took all us 'bambini,' as they like to call us, on a tour of southern Italy. Our first stop, after a six-hour drive through Italy's greening hills and olive trees, was Napoli ("Naples").
Pre-USAC trip, I was pretty excited to see Napoli. Sure, they've been having problems disposing of garbage. Sure, their major export--buffalo mozzarella--was recently recalled because of garbage contamination. Sure, the mafia runs everything in the dirty port city, including the non-disposal of garbage, but still! Naples is a tourist city. There has to be something there. At the very least, I hoped to see some Cosa Nostra activity.
I was disappointed. Napoli was filled with wild packs of family dogs and garbage. Mike, USAC's intern, and I discussed Napoli's similarities to bad parts of San Francisco and Oakland. Still, Aine, Natalie and I managed to have a pretty good, cheap lunch of pizza in the birthplace of pizza before our leaders took us on a tour of the palace. Napoli was, for the most part, ruled by viceroys, or stewards, not kings or doges, so this palace was slightly unimpressive. Comparatively speaking, that is.
The entry way, all in white (demonstrating the lack of money. Otherwise, it would have been guilded) was pretty majestic:
I never saw anything Mafia-related go down. Sadly.
Post-palace and some free time, we departed for Sorrento, our home base. For the rest of our trip, we stayed in a hotel surrounded by lemon trees, with a view of the coast (that's the Mediterranean, baby!):
My feet above our hotel's private lemon and orange grove:
Lonely Planet calls Sorrento "an unabashed resort town," which may be true, but it's also the slice of Italy everyone's looking for: White buildings, blue waters, sun, clean streets peppered with little trattorias and souvenir shops selling limoncello. Natalie and I opted out of climbing Vesuvius one afternoon and spent it walking around and sipping white wine on our hotel's rooftop solarium. In Amalfi, after another breathtaking tour of a cathedral, Aine, Natalie and I sunbathed on pebbly beaches and collected sea glass.
A shot of the Amalfi coast, including the beach we spent some hours on:
Natalie, Aine and I, cute as a Christmas-card, on the beach:
The cathedral in Amalfi:
The church, as Amalfi was a maritime republic in the days when spice trading with the Orient was like oil trading with the Husseins, has a lot of Moorish influences:
Sight-seeing wise, we also hiked around the nearly perfectly preserved city of Pompeii. I'd learned about Pompeii as a child and, after seeing tons of ruins while being led around by a tourguide, was still blown away. Pompeiians not only invented curbs, speed-bumps, fast-food, indoor plumbing and brothels, but were clever enough to get blasted by a volcanic eruption, so it could all be viewed by us later. The brothel (stone-beds and frescoes advertising specialities) was, of course, a high point for a Nevadan, but I personally enjoyed the plaster casts of bodies:
Our tourguide, Barbara, informed us they suffocated to death. I don't know how anyone could tell:
This is a picture of Pompeii's old boat dock. The blast moved the water outward several meters, as well as changing the shape of Vesuvius itself (which is the mountain in the background):
Also, on the tourist-y agenda was Caserta, a royal palace built in the countryside for hunting and based off Versailles in France (ironically, Marie Antoinette's ugly sister, Maria Carolina, built and lived in this palace). It's one of the biggest tourist attractions in Italy (for Italians.)
In WWII, the Allies used this as a base of operations. In addition to furniture looting, they cut the ornate doors, so they would open two ways (Italians like to point out Allied damage to Italy, while convieniently leaving out their own cooperation with the Nazis, but you know, whatever):
This entryway was also where George Lucas shot scenes of Queen Amidala's palace
Aine taking a picture of a throne at the end of a typical room inside the palace:
The palace had magnificent gardens, including Baroque fountains, statues and reflecting pools like in Washington D.C. that we got to walk around:
I spent the days in the sun senza sunscreen, working on my tan (and by tan, I mean "sunburn and freckles"). After saying, "People's feet never get sunburned," this is what I looked like back in Viterbo, city of rain and pigeons:
2 comments:
I was reading the New Yorker today (while waiting for my last class to end as my teacher prattles on idiotically.) This is a poem they had about Italy. It made me think of you. Relish every moment.
In Italy
by Derek Walcott
April 21, 2008
Roads shouldered by enclosing walls with narrow; Italy, Italians; Travel; Old Age; Europe; Adriatic Sea; Liguria I
Roads shouldered by enclosing walls with narrow
cobbled tracks for streets, those hill towns with their
stamp-sized squares and a sea pinned by the arrow
of a quivering horizon, with names that never wither
for centuries and shadows that are the dial of time. Light
older than wine and a cloud like a tablecloth
spread for lunch under the leaves. I have come this late
to Italy, but better now, perhaps, than in youth
that is never satisfied, whose joys are treacherous,
while my hair rhymes with those far crests, and the bells
of the hilltop towers number my errors,
because we are never where we are, but somewhere else,
even in Italy. This is the bearable truth
of old age; but count your benedictions—those fields
of sunflowers, the torn light on the hills, the haze
of the unheard Adriatic—while the day still hopes
for possibility, cloud shadows racing the slopes.
II
The blue windows, the lemon-colored counterpane,
the knowing that the sea is behind the avenue
with balconies and bicycles, that the gelid traffic
mixes its fumes with coffee—transient interiors,
transient bedsheets, and the transient view
of sea-salted hotels with spiky palms,
in spite of which summer is serious,
since there is inevitably a farewell to arms,
to the storm-haired beauty who will disappear.
The shifted absence of your axis, love
wobbles on your body’s pivot, to the carriage’s
shudder as it glides past the roofs and beaches
of the Ligurian coast. Things lose their balance
and totter from the small blows of memory.
You wait for revelations, for leaping dolphins,
for nightingales to loosen their knotted throats,
for the bell in the tower to absolve your sins
like the furled sails of the homecoming boats.
the format is better at this link: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2008/04/21/080421po_poem_walcott
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