Naples was the second stop on our Italy tour with Rick and Dave in May and June of 2015. People are warned to be careful of Naples, or to skip it entirely, but I found the city fascinating and wish we had more time there. We even walked around the railway station for quite a while, which is a genuinely seedy area. I experienced a kind of disbelief that the city kept going every day, that people got up and lived their lives there, it seemed to teeter on the brink of chaos all the time.
Photo List (Total 583 Photos)
Click bolded headers below to view, or click "just the best" for quick tour
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Naples Historical Core (148 photos) - This series of photos documents our walk through the oldest sections of Naples. We started at Piazza Dante, dips under the Port Alba into the busy commercial district along the Via dei Tribunali. The photos here are narrow crowded commercial streets, with a pleasant busy feel. Some of the big Piazzas are the Piazza San Domenico Maggiore and the Piazza del Gesu Nuovo, both well represented here. The gallery continues into the religious complex of Santa Chiara, with its remarkable majolica-tiled Cloister of the Clarisses. The gallery continues through churches to the Galleria Umberto I, a beautiful shopping complex. After that we go to the port, past the Castel Nuovo, and the Piazza del Plebescito. Also cannoli and pasta.
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Area Near the Museo (24 photos) - Our hotel was up near the Museo metro station, on Via Salvator Rose, a crooked hilly street topped with overhanging, decaying buildings. When we arrived here first, it was overwhelming, but we sort of got used to the traffic and the crumbling blocks towering over the street. We took a walk in the area one evening looking for supper, and ended up on a little alley with few streets leading off of it, that was fascinating to walk down at dusk.
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Up and Down from San Martin (53 photos) - This gallery documents our voyage up a hill that borders the central city, for the views, and then back down. We went up via funicular, then walked to the Piazza San Martin, which is quite close to a museum and a castle, neither of which we entered. We took in the fantastic view of the city, and opted to return to the centre of town via a series of pedestrian walkways heading down the steep cliffs. At the end of the walk, we found ourselves in the narrow streets of Montecalvario, busy commercial streets just west of the Via Toledo.
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Around Garibaldi Station (87 photos) - Travel guides are consistent in telling tourists not to linger in the area around Garibaldi train station. Dirty, dangerous, unappealing. We spent hours there, partially because after we returned from Pompeii, we wanted to go to Mimi's restaurant nearby, as Rick's aunt had visited years before. So, we first searched for the restaurant, found it, then killed several hours by walking the streets waiting for the evening course to open. We saw lots of abandoned churches, busy market areas, some fairly sketchy streets with clusters of youths lingering to no apparent end. Lots of garbage and grafitti, but something about the messiness was interesting, and definitely non-threatening.
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Naples Subway (35 photos) - Though the Naples subway has two lines, and we took both, all these photos are of the fabulous and beautiful new stops on Line 1. Naples is going all-out to create subway stations that are startling in their moderninity, with the goal of delighting users of the system. These photos show four or five of the supermodern stops, so unexpected in this city of grime.
Outside of Naples
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Pompeii (92 photos) - We took the local train to Pompeii and spent the better part of a day exploring the ruins. These photos show the interior and exterior of some of the better buildings at that site.
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Amalfi Coast (79 photos) - We rented a car from Naples on a Sunday morning and caught the A3 close to Garibaldi Station out of town. The goal was to drive the Amalfi Coast, but we took a detour into randomly-chosen, non-touristy hill towns near by, eventually ended up in a place called Sieti, where the road went no further. Though the town was tiny, we still got lost and needed directions to get our way out. We returned to the coast, and drove the Amalfi highway, which had quite a bit of traffic, but it was bearable. There was only one place where traffic completely snarled, and it snarled in a sort of interesting way. Many of these photos are quite beautiful, but they were often taken by stopping the car somewhere precarious, jumping out, snapping, jumping back in and taking off.
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Sorrento (65 photos) - We spent the night in Sorrento, which was a resort town on the north shore of the Amalfi coast. Driving through charming towns all day, we arrived here and immediately got caught up in the narrow streets as we tried in vain to find our hotel with a very useless map. It was 45 minutes of stress, with some very narrow turns navigated by Yvon, but we did eventually settle in, wander around, see a sunset, have supper, and get a good sleep.
