in this life of living & learning: Napoli & Pompeii, with a sprinkle of Sorrento

After wrapping things up in Cuneo last Thursday, arriving back in Alba, grabbing a quick bite to eat & jetting off to the bus stop, we were on our way to Naples for the weekend! Getting there involved a lurching & nauseating 1-hour stick-shift bus ride, a 10-hour train trip that could be likened to a fidgety slumber party in Korinne's bathroom (lol :P), a couple stops on the Napolitan metro, and a 3-minute walk to our hostel.

Stepping out of the metro and onto the streets of Naples, this was my first impression: Naples is dirty...

On the way to our hostel.. see the pile of trash on the side of the street?

So I definitely don't want to give Naples a bad rep or anything, but I honestly was kind of disappointed by it. Don't get me wrong, I had a pretty fun weekend, but it wasn't outstanding, and I wouldn't rave about it as a place one must absolutely go to. I guess I just had higher expectations for it b/c several friends of mine who had been there had told me that I should visit it and were super excited about me going. It's okay though, I still got to see another part of Italy :) I'm also glad to be able to say that although Naples is apparently famous for pickpocketers, my friends and I (six girls altogether) made it thru a long weekend in the Naples area without getting pickpocketed, even with the amount of time that we spent on the somewhat sketchy metro. :]

We arrived in Naples around 9 Friday morning. We asked around at the tourist information office about how to get to the places we planned to go during the weekend (Sorrento, Pompeii, Archeological Museum) and were told that this particular weekend, all national museums were free. Sweet! Not sure what the occasion was, but it was a pretty sweet deal. We bought a day pass for the metro and made our way over to our hostel, which was actually really nice. I've never stayed at a hostel before, so I wasn't really sure what to expect. The difference between a hostel and a hotel is that at a hotel, you pay for the room per night, but at a hostel you pay for a bed each night, so you could end up with roommates that are complete strangers. This one was nice though, it had colorful walls, our room was spacious, and it was a youth hostel, so the other guests were all teens/college age kids like us. We had an 8-person room with four bunk beds; since there were 6 of us in our group, there were only 2 people that we didn't know in our room, and we didn't really meet them because they came in to sleep after we had already turned in for the night.


The entrance to our hostel. The gate that could only be opened by the people at the front desk buzzing you in was a comfort and made us feel safe staying there.

One side of our hostel room; mine's the top bunk :)

After dropping our stuff off at the hostel & locking our stuff in the room lockers (can't ever be too cautious), we headed out again to get food. By this point, it was somehow already 1 or 2 in the afternoon, and we were starved. Our last meal had been around 9pm the previous night, who could blame us? After making our way back to Central Station, we found our solution. This became my first meal in Naples:

Don't judge - it was delicious!

With our bellies satisfied and happy, we were finally ready to explore. The original plan was to go to Sorrento, another city about an hour & ten minutes' train ride from Naples. However, with the rainy weather and it already being later in the afternoon, we were advised against it by the people at the tourist office and the people at the hostel front desk. The guy at the front desk pointed out a couple streets, one a more cultural one that had a castle, and the other one for shopping. We left for our exploration of Naples, heading toward Castel S. Elmo first.

On the way up to the castle, Julianna spotted this cameo factory store, a family-run business. We ended up spending probably about an hour and a half to two hours total here. :P

This is me with Renato, one of the elderly men who ran the store. They were sooo nice! They gave us a free sample of the carved cameos, & they also spoke really good English, which was cool :)

This is his brother (I think?) showing us how they carve the shells into jewelry and such.


Some of their jewelry on display - they were sooo gorgeous!


Another thing on display - they were so incredibly detailed!

This is Castel S. Elmo, but we decided not to go inside because there was a 5 euro entrance fee. We started to head back, but then the old guys at the cameo store told us to head down to the piazza at the end of the hill, where there was quite a view...

...& they were so right!

I'm pretty sure that's Mt. Vesuvius in the background - pretty awesome, right?

Another makeshift panoramic view

So wandering around Naples was pretty cool and fun. Apparently Naples is supposed to have the best pizza in Italy, so I had me some Margherita Pizza (basically a cheese pizza) for dinner, and it was quite delicious :)

On Saturday we hit up Pompeii; most of my pictures from the weekend are actually from Pompeii, so I'm prolly just going to put that in a separate post, especially since this one's already so long, haha.

Sunday we got a semi-early start and went to the Archeological Museum in Naples. Didn't wander too long around there, but we did see a bunch of marble statues, as well as artifacts and such from Pompeii.

Museo Archeologico in Naples

My favorite room in the museum. The ceiling was covered in more of those paintings that make it look like they're 3-D, but they're just paint! It's amazing.

Aerial view of Pompeii.. apparently we only covered about 1/3 of it during our Saturday there!

Plastic model of Pompeii

After the museum we finally made our way over to Sorrento. We only got 2 1/2 hours there, but we definitely enjoyed it. It seemed like a nice, clean, quaint town/city with flea market type shopping that the rest of the girls particularly enjoyed. I managed to make it through the day without buying anything, but that's because I had already bought a purse and jacket back in Naples. I tried doing some souvenir shopping in Sorrento but didn't really find anything.. that's okay, though, since we still have another two months here :)