Monday, June 21, 2004
How to do Naples in three days
On this day, Tim and I decided to visit the Amalfi coast. Just two hours away from Naples, this beautfiful shoreline has rocky cliffs, charming villages and sunny beaches. It's the perfect escape from the filth and fury of Naples.
While waiting for the train, we met some Americans, which was something of a rare happening on this trip. First was a group of four South Asians who had just graduated from Penn. Their leader was a petulant (but pretty) girl from Los Angeles. She wasn't sure which train could take them to Mt. Vesuvius, so she kept pestering a young Italian man for help. (He was a good sport.) The next American we met was a purser for United Airlines. Suiting a professional traveller, he had a gung-ho attitude toward vacationing. He was travelling alone on a Mediterranean cruise, and his ship was docked in Naples for two days. When our train arrived, I thought he might want to join us for the hour-long ride, but before I could ask him, he ran off to another car.
After our train pulled into the station, we transferred to a bus that would take us the rest of the way along the coast. The view was breathtaking. The drive was similar to stretches of Highway 1 on the California coastline, but it was distinguished by Mediterranean houses and a deep blue sea. We drove through Positano, the village where the bikini was supposedly invented.
Positano
Then we made it to the village of Amalfi. Amalfi is a popular tourist destination, with a mix of budget travelers like us and folks pulling up in Benzes. There are quite a few exclusive cliffside homes. (You can tell these by their swimming pools.)
 |
 |
| Amalfi | |
After a short lunch, Tim and I headed for the beach. Most beaches we saw were private — some can only be accessed by boat — but we settled for the public variety. You get what you pay for, though, because after a brief fifteen minutes of peace and quiet, a herd of teenagers charged on the beach. They provided the afternoon's entertainment, which was to watch hormone-crazed boys drag screaming girls into the water.
Cliffside at Amalfi
I enjoyed Amalfi thoroughly, but what's not to love about a sun-drenched coastal paradise?
Mt. Vesuvius
We returned to Naples for dinner. We ended up walking pretty far, down to the waterfront, and settled for a busy restaurant named Il Regno di Napoli. Boy, was it ever the king of Naples. It wasn't for the food — my pizza, a salty concoction named the "Cafone", was the most vile pie I'd ever eaten. Rather, it was for what was happening inside. There was a table of fifteen or twenty college-aged fighette in party dresses, all of them drop-dead gorgeous. (Fighetta is the Italian word for "babe", or so I was told.) Once in a while, some of them would step outside for a smoke, and in these moments it seemed that the entire sidewalk (including us) paused and turned their heads. What really made them special was how much they stood out from Naples's common denominator — they were like the Hilton sisters on a stopover in Flint, Michigan. (Tim thought, though, that they were still outclassed by Parisians.) There were a few extremely lucky guys with them. One of them was Sri Lankan — we joked that he was their Balki (the fish-out-of-water character from the '80s sitcom Perfect Strangers). But at the end of the night, the joke was on us. He left the restaurant with one of the girls, apart from the rest of the crowd.
After stopping for Italy's best gelato at a shop named, appropriately, Fantasia, we went back to the hostel. (I thought the gelato was a bargain at $2.15, but a friend told me she had gotten a cone in Naples four years ago for 50¢.) At the hostel, Tim and I were about ready to hit the sack, when we heard a conversation in the common room. One of the Australian proprietors was lambasting an American he had recently come across. "I hate the way Americans think they can put their finger on a place by passing through it in a ridiculously short amount of time," he cried. "One of them asked me how she could do Naples in three days. I was thinking, You don't do a city in three days. You see it — better yet, you experience it." (After that outburst, a British girl chipped in to the conversation with an attack on evangelical Christians who, she alleged, stay in hostels to proselytize travelers.)
I whispered to Tim, "Now we know what they think about us." I whispered. Tim rolled his eyes, then proceeded to lambaste their attitude.
