Napels is a dump and Pompei is a ruin

We had no real expectations heading into Naples for the 2 nights we were there and only really started to look when we booked our room from Rome using laterooms.com (which had a perfect record of good hotels for really cheap). And what we read on the internet and in our lonely planet was quite good, once were ‘industrial city’ now glitzy seaside metropolis close to island beach resorts like Capri and in the area where Vesuvius blew her top and covered Pompeii and the surrounding area. So we thought we were in for a bit of an unexpected treat.

Well maybe not………

We arrived by train in the afternoon and the city met us like the dirty industrial behemoth that she turned out to be. There was rubbish everywhere, the place looked like a dump. And as we found out on our return to the UK Naples rubbish collection is controlled by the Mafia and the have been putting a halt on collection to make money of other areas shipping there rubbish in, damn mob.

And even combined with the fact that our room was a s#!thole and manned by the dodgiest Italians so far, we were not going to let it ruin our stay. So we decided to take a nice walk along the waterfront to see if we could get a ferry over to one of the islands. This was made a little harder by the relentless wind and insane drivers, I mean we thought the drivers in Rome were crazy but these guys take the pizza pie. We eventually gave up on going to an island and got some food and wine, locked ourselves in our room and watched bad Italian dubbed Walker Texas Ranger episodes.

Our only picture we took of Naples (the only clean place we could find)

There was no way we were going to spend the next day in the city so we hopped on a train and headed out to Pompeii to see the ruins. The actual ruins were a small walk from the train station but of course we got on the wrong train and had a 5k walk, ah well it meant we didn’t have to ride with the huge groups of Asian and American tourists.

The Ruins itself is a really cool place and big, we walked for 6 hours solid and still didn’t see all the ruins. Anyway we armed ourselves with an audio guide and headed out.
Most of the ancient city is still really well intact and you can really imagine the way people used to live from the building and other remains in the site.

The bodies in some of the houses are a bit freaky, most of them look like they just fell asleep but there are some stuck in frightened poses which I guess conveys the destruction that a volcanic eruption can cause (watch out ruapehu).

acient sewer system, blocks so you can walk across the street which would have been covered in poo

Most of the views around Pompeii are pretty spectacular, melding the uncovered ruins of an ancient civilization against the mountain that preserved them for us to see and in doing so wiped out and entire region from the map.

Anywho, buy the time we got back to Naples we had been on our feet for 8 hours and were in dire need of some relaxation. And what better way to do it than by doing what we had done every night since being in Italy, by going to a local restaurant and getting filled up on local dishes and drunk on local wine.

And now just as you expect me to criticize Naples some more it started to redeem itself (if only in a small way). The food and vino was the best we’d had in Italy and not to mention the cheapest, 2 euro for a ½ liter of wine is nuts (ah well I’m not really one to complain).