Napoli is a city of chaos. We arrived to this dirty, crowded city after dark. It felt like we were arriving to some city in the heart of Africa. The place we were staying at was incredibly difficult to find, especially from the direction we were trying to approach it. Once, we started going up this street which got narrower and narrower. It got so narrow it became difficult to navigate between the vehicles parked on each side. I eventually had to turn off onto another road.
Finding our hosts house took quite some time. We ended up parking in a plaza at the bottom of the hill and walking the skinny streets up to his house. Walking up some zigzagging staircases we finally found it. He was an elderly man living in a big house off of a small community courtyard. Him and some friends treated us to some very traditional pizza with mozzarella di bufala.
One afternoon we took a tour of the Naples underground. It was just as impressive to be underground knowing that the mayhem of the city was just above us, as it was to realize on the streets outside that such quiet catacombs were below.
One day we went walking up the endless staircases of the city to the fortress at the top. We had a very funny encounter with a dog, who thought he was the fiercest thing in the country. Javier showed him who was boss. With a few barks and a couple steps toward the dog Javier had him running and crying all the way home.
At the top of the stairs you can see out across the city all the way down to Mount Vesuvius.
On the south side of the volcano is the ancient city of Pompei. This city was incredibly well preserved since it had been completely buried under several meters of ash until its discovery in the 16th century. The sad thing now is that the Italian government has not been taking the best care of the city. Not long before we arrived one of the buildings collapsed.
As they excavated the city they began to notice large oddly shaped air pockets in the ash. In a moment of genius they filled these holes with plaster. As they suspected, these air pockets were the voids left after the bodies of the people buried in the ash had decayed. The resulting plaster molds were perfect images of the last moments of the people of Pompei. The shriveled screaming figures are terrifying. Unfortunately these plaster molds are falling apart today. The technology used when they were made was not meant to last so long.
