Naples, Pompeii

On the way to Naples, we experience this funny incident: Somewhere in the Italian countryside, we want to have a caffè after refueling at a gas station. The family running the station supplies us with Italian anecdotes (which we don't understand), a (free) bouquet of lemons from their own cultivation, and some (chargeable) regional snack specialties (that we wouldn't have chosen on our own, especially not so many...). This stop will definitely stay in our memory.

Since we also want to visit the ancient city of Pompeii at our destination, we set up our camp right in front of the entrance to the Pompeii site. But first, we visit Naples' old town. We want to eat the famous Neapolitan pizza. But before the Neapolitan pizza, there's the hurdle of Neapolitan traffic. Because in order to be flexible (at least we think so), we drive the approximately 20 km route by car instead of taking the train. I don't want to say that we should have reconsidered, but the search for a parking space was, to put it mildly, the second unexpected Naples adventure. The first was driving in the city, but the experiences of the previous days had prepared us quite well. There will be a separate blog post about driving in Italy later on. At least we made it out without any accidents.

In these days, Naples is under the sign of the Italian men's football championship. Everyone here is convinced that SSC Naples will win the championship next weekend (which didn't come true in hindsight - it took another week). Light blue and white everywhere you look. On the one hand, it's an interesting feeling to experience this atmosphere concretely. On the other hand, we don't see the old town as the Neapolitan old town normally looks. So, this year's photos are authentic, but different than expected.

What else is there to say: we never felt unsafe. No rip-offs or tricksters - there could be many reasons for that.

In any case, we get our genuine pizza, and it seems we made a good choice with our arbitrary selection. While we were sitting in the not-so-small pizzeria, a mega queue formed outside. Is it really because of the pizza maker? In any case, he had hung up plenty of photos, newspaper clippings, and awards inside, which showed that we were indeed dining at a special place. And yes, it was worth it.

One day later, we visit the sunken city again (for the third time). Of course, we took many photos again. But here we only show a few without further comment.