I love May. I think it's the two bank holidays book ending the month and the added daylight and chance of sunshine. That and the fact it's normally the first time I have off work since the dark days of Christmas. This time last year I took J home to see where I grew up, this year I went all Italian.
I've never once, ever, wanted to go to Italy.
Just never interested me. It's full of Italians for a start, and it's on the Mediterranean - I mean, how very 1980s package holiday. Nope, it was another continent or nothing for me.
Funny how your opinion can change within a nano-second of arriving somewhere, isn't it? To be fair, I had been getting progressively more excited about the trip as the time drew nearer, and endured the usual squeaky bum time on the journey to the airport that something would go horribly wrong (i.e. me falling into an alcohol-induced slumber) that would prevent me catching my flight.
But arrive in the land of Mafioso and pizza I did, and it blew me away. Naples is an absolutely intoxicating city - a living, breathing Italian cliche. It's just as I imagined it: perched on a series of terraces over-looking the Bay of Naples; grand, colourful, crumbling, flaky, tenements crowding over narrow streets; the beautiful, not-so-beautiful, young and old whizzing about on scooters; noise, dirt, heat and smell. Feckin amazing.
I'd read a few things prior to going that it was dangerous and not very tourist friendly - but to me that was almost the best thing. Yeah, people speak English, but they let you try pidgin-Italian first before replying in it. At no point did I feel like a tourist on holiday. I was, of course, but there are so few of the buggers about (save for Pompeii, Vesuvius etc of course) that I felt like we were just living for a couple of days in another city. We stayed in Mergellina, a suburb of the city round the bay from the main centre of Piazza Garibaldi, and were surrounded by normal everyday city life going on around us. It was utterly amazing.
I have a few photos - a mixture of camera phone and proper camera - which are on Flickr here
Pompei and Vesuvius were fantastic too - the view from Vesuvius was breath-taking over Napoli to the North and, err, somewhere else to the South.... There's something a bit strange about staring into the crater of an active volcano as steam rises out of the ground a few feet away. The best thing about it was - being chilled and Mediterranean, we were rewarded with a glass of wine at the top. Made the climb that little bit more satisfying. Following the volcano with a trip to Pompeii added a certain eerie edge to proceedings, not helped by the fact we arrived at 5.30pm - 2 hours before it closed but after the majority of the tourist hordes had left for the evening. It was a beautifully sunny day but walking round the city in near silence, with Vesuvius looming in the distance, really brought home what had happened there. The volcano looks pretty far away and I can totally understand why they thought they were safe from it's power. Trying to imagine what it must have been like on the day still sends shiver down my spine. To think that there are cities and towns that are now standing as monuments to the eruption of 2000 years ago, which are nowadays like any other town but for almost 2 millenia were buried under the ground. Doesn't bear thinking about. It's like wandering around a giant theme park or reconstruction. Until you realise it's real.
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