Napoli, Italy

Italy 2024 Chapter 6 – Napoli. People either love or hate Napoli. Most hate it, too busy, too dirty, too much crime. With so many other places in Italy higher on travellers’ itineraries, Napoli often gets overlooked. Some briefly pass through on their way to the Amalfi coast or while they visit Pompei. This was my second time in Napoli, but I hope to spend more time here. Napoli to me is the real Italy and I love it. It’s a busy, noisy, gritty city that’s also the birthplace of pizza.

We drove from Matera and stayed about 20 minutes outside of Napoli near Herculaneum. The hotel was an old villa with enclosed parking. When we arrived the girl at check-in gave us the keys and a fob for opening the gate for the van. I told her we were only staying one night and wouldn’t need the fob as the van would remain parked until we checked out. She chuckled, and said, “ok, you are scared”. You see, Napoli has a reputation for crazy drivers, which is true to be sure, but that’s not why we left the car. We left it because our insurance on the rental didn’t cover theft from Napoli. It covered theft everywhere else, but not in Napoli. The next morning, we drove into the heart of Napoli, to return the van to the train station, we made it without incident, but it was an interesting drive for sure.

In the evening, we took the train into Napoli centrale and set out to explore a bit. I found the spectacular Duomo and then wandered around the Quartieri Spagnoli, looking for a mural of Napoli’s favourite (adopted) son, Diego Maradona. It turns out, there are hundreds of street art featuring Maradona here and despite asking some locals where the famous one was, we never found it. I had a memorable conversation with a helpful older man, who also pointed us in the direction of another mural, not the one I was looking for, however. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of Diego Maradona to the people of Napoli. He was the greatest soccer player in the world at the time, and he chose to play for Napoli and the people loved him for it. Maradona brought Napoli two Serie A titles and a European title. Serie A has been dominated by northern Italian teams from Milan and Turin for decades. It’s been won by a team in the south only 4 times, Cagliari, Napoli twice with Maradona and Napoli again in 2023. Maradona is literally a god in Napoli. When Maradona's Argentina met Italy in Naples at the 1990 World Cup, some of the home fans did the unthinkable and cheered for the South Americans.

Finally, we made our way back to the main street and had dinner. I had a fantastic pizza, probably the best I’ve ever had. A Neapolitan special, simply tomatoes, garlic and basil. The train trip back to the hotel turned out to be a nightmare. Somehow, we ended up on an express train and it flew right by our stop and didn’t look like it was going to stop until Salerno, which would have been a disaster. Luckily a helpful young man used his phone and told us to get off at the next stop (which was far from our hotel) Finally, the train stopped, and the man quickly told us to get off and get on the train waiting in the opposite direction. Thankfully this train retraced our route and stopped in the right place. It cost us about half an hour, but it could have been way worse.

In the morning, we spent a few hours at Herculaneum. A smaller town that was also buried in the 79AD Mount Vesuvius eruption. I have been to Pompeii in the past, and this time I wanted to see the smaller, better-preserved Herculaneum. Pompeii is further away from Vesuvius, but in the early part of the eruption, the people of Herculaneum could see rocks and lava bombarding Pompeii and they remained untouched for hours. Several people went for help and were to evacuate from the port. Hundreds of people were waiting at the port when a pyroclastic flow hit the city, killing everyone instantly. You can still see the skeletons of dozens of people who were waiting to be rescued.

We picked it up our van in Palermo, and drove it across Sicily, Calabria, to Matera, and now Napoli. Finally, it was time to return it to the train station and take the train an hour north to one of the world's GREATEST cities….ROMA.