Advertisement
Published: September 27th 2006
Edit Blog Post
September 23
Today we went into Naples. We said good-bye to our beautiful, movie-star hotel. First we had to climb up to the top to take pictures. It was even more amazing from the top! We started off in Naples at the Napoli Museo Archeologico Nazionale. This was probably one of my favorite museums yet. It was so cool and really well designed. It had some amazing collections, including a temporary exhibit on the riches found in Pompeii. It always amazes me to see things that survive centuries. We got permission to go to the famous “Secret Cabinet” there. Everyone was making fun of me because I had asked Emilio to take us there because I had heard about it, and I really was just curious, not for a pervy reason. But basically the “Secret Cabinet” is a room with a collection of phallic items from Pompeii. It used to only admit men, those of which had “a mature nature and were in good-standing”. Anyways, it really is just fascinating. One might think that it’s just a big room of antiquity porn, but to the people of Pompeii it was a symbol of good luck. For example it was common
to walk up to a Pompeii house and see a penis with wings with a bunch of wind chimes attached to it hanging outside. It really makes you think twice about how people perceive things and meanings associated to certain events in other cultures. But no fear, I won’t be hanging any winged-penises outside my door anytime soon.
After the museum, we broke for lunch. A few of us followed Emilio to this little restaurant for pizza.
We got back on the bus and headed to this building that was built I think in the 1940s but it was really interesting because it combined straight lines with curves in a really inventive way. We walked to the Museo Civico Castel Nuovo which was really fun. I love castles because I’m a sucker for fairy-tales. It was a really cool castle with a huge view of the coast. We walked to a piazza, saw an amazing basilica which happened to have a wedding going on inside. We walked to a plaza near by which was somewhat like a mall. The plaza was really neat and the floor had a mosaic in the center of all the zodiac signs. Of
course I took a proud picture next to Virgo. We walked back to the bus to gather our things because 16 of us decided to use the rest of the weekend to see Capri.
We took the ferry to the island of Ischia. It was pretty close to Capri and had a good hostel. At first, we got off when the ferry stopped. We were all very chummy and so excited we made to Ischia, when we look around and somehow realized it WASN’T ISCHIA! We got off on the wrong island! All of us turn around and start sprinting towards the boat. The ram was about ¼ of the ways up and we were screaming to stop. It was the last ferry of the night, so we had to make it on there. Luckily the understood, laughed at us, and let us back on. But no worries, I made it to Ischia alright. We got off, took a bus to the hostel and checked in. It was my first time to stay in a hostel and surprisingly it wasn’t bad. It was pretty nice. There were so many of us that I just had to share a room
with 5 of the girls out of the group and it was just like a big ol’ bunkin’ party! After we checked in, we were starving. We walked up the street to a ristorante, but to our dismay they were having a private party. Ischia is pretty small, kind of like Eureka Springs, and we didn’t know of another ristorante in sight. So Zach, being our prized Italian speaker, went in and asked the pizza maker if we could order some pizzas to go. He said no problem, so we all piled in and ordered our pizzas. I watched him make them, and it was so artistic. He could just plop out some dough, in two motions have it flattened to a perfect circle, swirl sauce on, sprinkle the ingredients in and in swift sweeps put it in the brick-oven. Really cool. We took our pizzas and some wine made at the restaurant (amazing!) outside and ate in these cool alcove/seating areas outside of the restaurant. It overlooked the harbor and it really felt like a dream.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.215s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 11; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0464s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb