We were up early; N finished the packing, and all of us finished off whatever food we could eat (there was fruit left over). We had arranged for Massimiliano to come at ten, but we were ready well before then; I took the last load of garbage down to the dumpsters on the corner, and we stripped all the sheets, folding them into a neat pile, and tidied everything up out of apartment. He arrived on time, called us a cab on his mobile, and gave us back our deposit without even looking at the place. "Was everything good?" he asked. "Mostly," I said, "it was a bit noisy." "Oh?" he said, raising his eyebrows in surprise. "No one has ever mentioned that before."
I doubt that.
The cab arrived rapidly, and we were off. It was interesting to compare the ride to Termini to the one from the airport; during the latter, I had somewhat of an idea where we were most of the time, but knowledge gleaned from flat maps is quite inadequate. This time, I felt as if I could have driven the route myself. (It being Saturday morning, traffic was not bad.)
We had left plenty of time in case anything went wrong, and in fact arrived two hours before our train -- we might even have been able to hop on the previous Eurostar to Naples, were it not for the seat reservations. Termini has modernized, but there still is almost no place to sit (probably by design) and the main areas are bustling and noisy. We found a "binario" (the word means "track", I think, but we used it to refer to the platform between tracks) that seemed to be unused, walked halfway down it, and found a stone bench. The kids perched on it and opened their books. I wandered about, having a coffee at one of the bars, checking the layout of the left-luggage post and the lockers, and walking far out to where the trains for Fiumicino leave. Somewhere in there I managed to lose my sunglasses, but fortunately I had brought a spare pair.
The binario was not unused for long, and people flowed and ebbed around us, with the occasional beggar importuning. N and I took turns walking back down the platform to the main area to check the departures board and see where our train was leaving from. As the time approached, a delay was posted. The train was coming from Milan, and we learned later that a derailment had slowed traffic. When the track number was posted, we headed over, through a crush of people, pushing a cart with the luggage on it. The train pulled in, we found our car, stuffed the luggage in the bins by the door, and pulled the kids into the narrow aisle, completely filled with people.
It took some time to sort out the seat situation. We had bought the tickets by machine, asking for four seats in a two-facing-two configuration. What we were given, we discovered, were two facing each other by the window, and two on the opposite aisle. Of course, all were filled with people who didn't have seat reservations. After convincing them to leave, we swapped with the people in between (a mother and child travelling with the grandfather) so the kids sat together on one side and N and I sat facing each other. The three-year-old was pretty wiggly, and the mother kept pointing to A and Z sitting quietly reading as examples. She tried to convince the kid to talk to them, but he wouldn't. Eventually, he fell asleep for his afternoon nap across the two seats (twisted around the center armrest, which wouldn't move). They hung around in the aisle, going off to the bar car periodically for a coffee.
I hadn't thought to look for anything on the journey out of Rome, but spotted a spectacular run of aqueduct roughly paralleling the track a few minutes out, and resolved to look more closely on the way back. The rest of the voyage was uneventful; I dozed for a while, awoke to find the train reaching the coast just south of a small city with a curving bay and a castle atop the hill above, almost a miniature version of Naples. I had no large-scale map of Italy to look up what it might have been. The train was an express, with fixtures and seats more reminiscent of an airplane (and higher ticket prices, naturally).
We pulled into Napoli Centrale, half an hour late, and disembarked in a sea of people. The few carts we saw were in use, so we put the packs on our backs and headed down the binario. The best Napoli map we had, in the Eyewitness Guide we had borrowed from N's father, didn't have the street Santa Maria dell'Aiuto on it. After reading in every book I consulted about how dishonest Napoli taxi drivers are, I wasn't about to trust one to take us to some address blind, when it wasn't even where our apartment was. My plan was to try to get a map in the station that showed the street, and failing that, park N and the kids in some reasonably safe spot, buy a phone card, and try to contact Marco again.
But I didn't need to do all that, because Wolfgang and Paola were waiting for us at the end of the binario, along with a friend of theirs named Barbara. We hugged each other, and I explained the situation. Wolfgang had a map of the city for me, but it didn't have Santa Maria dell'Aiuto on it, either. Fortunately, Paola had a mobile, and being Italian, could deal with it. (Wolfgang is German, but as far as I can tell, he speaks good Italian.) She called Marco and spoke to him.
What she was told was that the apartment location had changed. It was now on Santa Maria dell'Aiuto, which was near the Piazza Santa Maria la Nova. That was on the map, but it was nowhere near Via Arte della Lana; it was twice as far from the railway station, still in the centro storico but farther east, roughly between Santa Chiara and the Castel Nuovo. I was annoyed, because I had researched the area where the apartment was supposed to be, but quickly figured out that the new location would, if anything, be an improvement, except for the increased difficulty of getting to and from the station. Marco would meet us there.
We all left the station. I was prepared to spring for two taxis provided Paola could negotiate, but Wolfgang thought a bus would be fine. The area in front of the station was a large piazza (Piazza Garibaldi) filled with a confusing mess of barriers, bus stops, and traffic. Wolfgang didn't know exactly where to find the bus, or which one to take, but we had to head down a broad avenue called Corso Umberto I (one of the few really wide streets in the city, clearly one of those avenues bulldozed through tenements by some local version of Baron Haussman), so it wasn't possible to go very wrong. We found a bus, got on (it was the origin, so there was space), and headed down. The bus turned off in an unexpected direction, but did so close to where we needed to be; we got off, shouldered the packs, and headed up the street.
We found the Piazza Santa Maria la Nova, but couldn't spot anything called Santa Maria dell'Aiuto. There was a restaurant in the Piazza with a couple of people talking in front of it, but they knew nothing about such a street. Great, I thought. It was not excessively hot; the weather was much like in Rome, hot but with a slight breeze. However, carrying a pack, even that short distance, had me sweating. Paola went off to explore, and soon returned; she had found Marco.
We walked around the corner and up a bit. It turned out that, like Lisbon, every tiny segment of a zigzagging street or alley had its own name. Santa Maria dell'Aiuto was one such segment, named after the church that stood next to the apartment block. Marco shook our hands, and we stepped through a small door set in a large wooden arched door entering into a courtyard.
"Why has the apartment location changed?" I asked, somewhat sternly. "It has not changed," said Marco, "it was always this apartment. The name is wrong on the Web page, but everything else about the description is correct." This was almost immediately proved wrong, however; the apartment was on the fourth floor as advertised, but there was no elevator. "They promise it next year," Marco said.
We trudged up the four floors, carrying our packs. (Wolfgang had gallantly taken N's pack at the station.) At the top, we entered the apartment, and met two more people, the woman Titi, and a man called Gianmaria. We put the packs down in a sitting room, more of an intersection with several rooms adjacent, and were offered some cold water. The situation got confusing; various people were talking to each other, mostly in Italian, and Marco was going around taking photographs of the place. Eventually I learned that Gianmaria was the apartment owner. He actually lived in the place, but would turn it over to us for these eight days. Titi took N and I around the place.
The kitchen was just off the sitting room, with a six-burner professional stove and much auxiliary equipment. Beyond that was a large high-ceilinged living room, tastefully decorated, with an antique piano. A staircase led up to the roof terrace, covering the whole top of the building, with chairs, an umbrella, a barbecue. A spiral staircase led down to a small plant-filled area just outside the sitting room. There was also a balcony overlooking the interior courtyard. The main bedroom, also off the sitting room, had a large ensuite bathroom with a Jacuzzi in it.
It was like stepping into some sort of heavenly vision. But like most visions, it was hollow at the core. Gianmaria dealt with us very little and seemed somewhat aloof when I asked him questions. Titi asked if we wanted to hire Gianmaria's cleaning woman. I said no, we weren't messy people and cleaned up after ourselves. But, after some further discussion, Gianmaria came up to me and told me he was making me a "gift" of having his cleaner come every day. In retrospect, I should have been more firm in refusing, or at least negotiating only one or two visits. But how was I to know? He also was quite vague when I asked him about good food and wine shops in the area. "There are many around," he said, waving his hands, "you can ask Maria Rosario [the cleaner] to buy whatever you want." When I asked about the washing machine that was advertised, he told me that she would wash our clothes for us. (Having had clothing destroyed in the past by others washing it, say in hot water instead of cold, we weren't about to do this, or ask her to haul groceries up four flights of stairs, either.)
Marco asked for the remainder of the payment, beyond the initial 20% deposit. I had been careful to arrange with the Rome office that they would charge my credit card for this, since I didn't want to have to change that much money (the eight days cost us a little under three million lire). "I would prefer that you pay us," he said. There was a level of middleman here too: Marco's firm was called My Home Your Home (quite literally, in this case). "I don't have the money," I said. "Can you get it tomorrow?" "No, I didn't bring that much, that's why I arranged it with Rome. You have to talk to them." If I had liquidated all my traveller's cheques and used my bank card to the max, I could have gotten the money. But I had the advantage, for once. After long conversations on their portables, the matter seemed to be dropped.
They all gave me cell phone numbers (some even corresponded to ones I already had) and told me to call "any time of the day or night", and drifted out. I threw together a daypack and we left as well.
From the beginning, the contrast with Rome was extreme -- and since Rome had palled on us a little bit, initially quite refreshing. Napoli assaults the senses. The streets in the centre are impossibly narrow and twisting; laundry hung from balconies and lines crossing alleys. People were selling items on little tables (bancarelles) or on plastic cloths spread on the sidewalk (when there was a sidewalk). Everyone looked like the working-class Brooklyn inhabitants in the movie Saturday Night Fever, and they made little attempt to share space. As fans of urban street life, we welcomed this, but it tended to be exhausting after a while. The largest contrast with Rome was the apparent lack of tourists. In Rome, just about everywhere we went, we could spot tourists on the street, and at times they were overwhelming. Here, everyone appeared to be a local; we stood out.
We had no plans, and W&P suggested just walking about. Their friend Barbara was visiting for the weekend from Paola's home town of Potenza (further south, in Basilicata). We first went up to the church of Santa Chiara, though to get there we had to wander through a series of alleys with scooters and even some small cars zipping past us. There was a mass in progress at the church, so we didn't go in, and the cloister was closed. We continued to the west and up to the street market at Montesanto, where N bought some fruit (grapes, pears, a melon) from a seller whose wares were just piled up in the middle of the sidewalk, in cardboard boxes. He weighed the produce on a brass hand-suspended scale that could have been a cleaned-up version of the ancient ones we saw in museums, and flatly refused to sell us only a half kee of grapes -- one kilo minimum.
Down Via Toledo, a shopping street, and one with some modest width to it. We stopped in Piazza Carita and bought lemon granitas from a cart, whose owner scraped the side of a metal bin and delivered sweet, intense ice to us, thick with chunks of peel, in little plastic cups. Piazzas in Rome and Napoli look the same on the map, but in Rome they tend to be large and clearly delineated; in Napoli they were smaller than I expected, small enough that I might have missed them in a search, and chaotic with parked cars, scooters, pedestrians, bancarelles, delivery trucks, and construction barriers. We continued down along Via Toledo, which became pedestrian-only at this poin, though we stuck to the sidewalks, which had marginally fewer scooters on them. Barbara kept wandering away to buy this snack or that, or duck into stores. I was revelling in the sensations. Most striking was that there were no tourists visible. The city belonged to its inhabitants, in contrast with Rome, which sometimes felt as if the centro storico had been conceded to the invaders.
We arrived at the Galleria Umberto I, a large cross-shaped arcade with a glass-and-steel roof, like Milan's, or the pallid American imitations. This was described in one of our books as a dusty place where old men played cards, but it was beautiful, with the oblique sun illuminating the interior with a cathedral effect. The postage-stamp-sized pictures in the Eyewitness Guide couldn't capture the place. Best of all, there was a stand right at the entrance selling sfogliatelle (the quintessential pastry of Naples, a cone-shaped piece of puff pastry with sweet ricotta filling), baba al rum, cannoli, and other pastries. W&P bought us some.
The first bite of the sfogliatelle was stunning. I was reminded of the time in 85 when, after frustrating travel across western Greece and Yugoslavia, I arrived in Trieste, crossed the street from the bus station to the first small cafe I could find, ordered a cappuccino, and had one of the best coffees of my life. After the mediocre pastries in Rome, this was heaven. It wasn't a random place; the stall was a branch of La Sfogliatelle Mary, a pasticceria just opposite and up the hill, and is apparently known for its wares. It would be, as it turned out, the best sfogliatelle we would have, though most of the others were quite respectable.
Down a little bit and into the Piazza Plebiscito, for a change a wide and empty piazza, kept clear of traffic, with an odd bit of Rome envy at the west end: a church looking like the Pantheon, with a colonnade curving out to each side looking like the one in front of Saint Peter's. It didn't matter that it was a pastiche: it looked good. The kids, freed from fearing for their lives at every moment, ran around. They had been clinging to Paola's hands -- she quite indulged them -- and she chased them as best as she could in her heeled sandals.
We continued south, down the even wider Via Santa Lucia, and arrived at the waterfront. We walked briefly to the base of the Castel dell'Ovo, the small fortress built on a pier, but we couldn't go in, so we went back to Via Partenope and walked along the sea side. At one point Paola took the kids down a stairway to the water's edge, where they looked at boats and clambered among rocks.
Eventually we headed back inland, to the narrow Via Chaiatamone running along the back of the posh hotels that border Via Partenope, bordering the much poorer hill district of Pizzofalcone. W&P took us to Canta Napoli, a pizzeria carved into the rock of the hillside, with wall murals and waiters dressed in traditional Neapolitan fishing costumes. We had the traditional starter of frittura -- deep-fried items, mostly starchy ones -- and then several different kinds of pizzas, washed down with draft beer. It wasn't a stellar meal, but a pleasant one.
After dinner we went up a little way to the poshest cafe in town, the Gran Caffe Gambrinus. It was too expensive to eat at a table, but W&P sprung for some slices of cake which we ate standing up. N and I had pastiera, a torte made with (I think) farro and ricotta, which I thought was only available at Easter; quite tasty.
The others walked us home by way of the Castel Nuovo and the Piazza Municipio, through wide streets up to Piazza Santa Maria de Nova. After walking up the stairs (feeling the weight of my daypack with bottles of water and a few kilos of fruit in it), I set up the kids's beds (a sofa with a pullout section in a small room off the sitting room yielded two single beds). They went to sleep, and I poked about the apartment exploring.
The switches in each room were quite confusing, but none seemed to be for air-conditioning, as had been advertised. (There were volume controls everywhere, and speakers in the ceiling, but nothing in the owner's small collection of CDs was worth playing.) The Web site also spoke of three bedrooms and three bathrooms, but one bedroom was being used as a storage room, and one bathroom as a cleaning closet. That didn't really matter, as we weren't going to use all of them. The piano, which the kids had greeted with joy after being without one for two weeks, was so seriously out of tune that it was useless. Even more annoying was that the water pressure was quite low, and the water heater delivered a thin stream of water barely hot enough for me and definitely tepid as far as N was concerned. I sat under the thin stream in the Jacuzzi rinsing off the day's considerable sweat, using only the shower, which was a handheld unit with a hook at chest height. We hadn't asked how to operate the Jacuzzi, and though the controls appeared simple, it would have taken days to fill and not been warm enough. There was a shower unit in the children's smaller ensuite that would have let me shower standing up, but it was so narrow that I wouldn't have been able to soap my feet without hitting my knees against the door.
Worst of all, the apartment appeared as if the owner had simply stepped out. The fridge was full of food, including lettuce and half-drunk bottles of water and wine. The closets and drawers were full of his clothes, and when N unpacked, there was no place to put anything. Eventually we left most of the luggage on the floor, with various plastic bags of things we needed nearby, and set up two chairs in front of the closets on which our clothes were precariously piled. (Thank goodness we had brought less than a week's worth of light clothing.)
With the metal security shutters closed but the glass doors to the upstairs terrace off the sitting room and the windows in the entry hallway overlooking the courtyard open, there was just enough air movement to let us sleep well, though later in the week the breeze would die, bringing mosquitoes, and the residual heat absorbed by the roof all day would dominate.