The bustling busy city of Naples was a huge contrast to the isle of Capri. We stayed in a nice apt hotel near the Castel Nuovo. We enjoyed lots of pizza and gelato and found the noise of the scooters overwhelming!
The Sotterranea or underground city of Naples was an interesting place to visit. We had a guided English tour which lasted about 90 minutes. There were steep, slippy steps down into the caves. The underground caverns were once used as a city dump which subsequently got covered over. They were later used as bomb shelters in WW2. We walked through narrow tunnels carrying a candle to light the way. We saw flowering plants growing there with no watering just humidity. Then we visited an old house with a former Roman amphitheater in the basement. The street above was built on top covering the historical building till excavation works revealed some of the original building,
We booked a taxi to Pompeii on our last day in Naples. Part of he road was closed so we had to detour and spend longer on the car than hoped. Pompeii was busy with groups of tourists thronging around. It has about 2,5million visitors a year. We didn’t book a tour but rather walked around ourselves checking with google for the important bits not to miss. It was a huge city and it was interesting to compare the scale of it to Herculaneum, the nearby town also destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79. Pompeii was a rich city in its day and relics of the past were displayed along with plaster casts of human bodies that were discovered on site. The vision of Vesuvius looming in the background put the tragic events into perspective.
When we returned to Naples we got a bowl of pasta in town and headed to the airport for a flight to Catania.
Hairylambthewanderyears 