This was our day for exploring Napoli. I had bought "Giranapoli" day-long tickets at Napoli Centrale the day before, and we were hoping to make liberal use of them. But first, we did a bit of walking: to Via Toledo and down the street towards the water. I had coffee standing up at the bar at Gambrinus (okay) while N and the kids waited in the shade of the Palazzo Reale in Piazza del Plebescito; then we walked up Via Chiaia, the fancy shopping street, a little way in search of a pasticceria mentioned by Fred Plotkin. We couldn't find it (as it turned out, I had read the book wrong, and it was several blocks away on another street), so we turned back, went into the Galleria, and had pastries at La Sfogliatelle Mary. N and I had a sfogliatelle (not as transcendent as the very first one, but still the best in the city as far as we were concerned) and the kids had huge Sicilian cannoli, with the tubes coated in chocolate. It was a bit over the top for a breakfast, and I offered to get some plain brioche or cornetti at another place if anyone wanted, but no one did.
This visit also added a new twist to an obscure family trope of ours. When we were living together in Berkeley, N and I once went out for dinner at the California Culinary Academy with my former roommate and his sister. She was one of those people who were self-declared chocoholics, and she told us how she always ordered the most chocolaty item on the dessert menu. When it came, though, there was no chocolate in any of the choices. She was crestfallen, but clutched at a straw: one of the desserts was baba au rhum, and she asked me what it was. I explained that it was a little yeasted cake soaked in rum syrup. Could there be chocolate in the cake, she asked. I said it wasn't traditional. When the waiter arrived to take her order, she looked up at him and said, "These babas... are they chocolate babas?"
They weren't, of course, and N and I have retold the story many times since then. The phrase "Are those chocolate babas?" is used by us to evoke that sense of naive optimism or someone out of their depth and looking for familiarity. But there, in the small display case of La Sfogliatelle Mary, to the right at the bottom were: chocolate babas. N and I burst into laughter. The end of an era.
Back to Via Chiaia and up. Every window had "SALDI" (sale) written on it; it was the time when summer inventory was cleared out at reduced prices. N wanted me to watch out for Ecco shoes, which I needed, but I really wasn't up to the intricacies of haggling over merchandise. As we moved into Via G. Filangieri and Via del Mille, the street got wider, the shops posher, and the beggars denser. Through Piazza Amedeo and around the corner, and we were at the Funicolare di Chiaia, one of three funiculars going up the Vomero hill.
We validated our tickets and got on the car which had just arrived. The ride was a short one, though there were three stops, and we emerged onto a bright and busy street. A short walk up wide sidewalks, and we were in Piazza Vanvitelli, a leafy diagonal square with modern metro entrances (for the new line) that seemed straight out of Barcelona. Vomero is a newer and more upscale district.
We climbed towards the crest of the hill, into a quiet residential district. It was relaxing, but also a trifle dull. We found the Castel Sant'Elmo, the big fortress on the top of the hill. From the street, the air appeared so hazy that we could barely see Vesuvius, and we were sure any views would be disappointing. We moved into the shade of the castle, in the courtyard, to discuss it, and decided to skip seeing the Certosa (the former monastery, now a museum). Instead, we retraced our steps as far as the station of the northernmost funicular, the Funicolare di Montesanto, and rode it down to the station outside of which we had bought the fruit on Saturday.
There was a metro station close by (old line), and we caught the metro, after a short wait, down to the Mergellina stop. We walked down to the waterfront, past the touristy "chalets" (beachfront cafes, empty at this hour, though touts stood outside to try to convince us to go in with cries of "Pizza? Cold drink?") and back behind them, to a restaurant called Ciro a Mergellina that was in one of our books. It was a bit fancy looking, with linen tablecloths and waiters dressed much better than we were, but the prices were not astronomical, and the view of the waterfront was quite nice.
We were seated by a friendly waiter. N and the kids went off to wash up, and I contemplated how we were willing to compromise at times. We would normally not frequent a place that seemed to be selling atmosphere and obsequious service, but the air-conditioning and the chance to rest up from the bustle of the city were quite appealing at that moment. Fortunately, the food turned out to be quite good. N had a risotto di mare and Z a risotto di gamberi; generous servings and quite well prepared. A had a pizza margherita that in terms of flavour was probably the best any of us had the entire trip: the mozzarella was superb and the tomatoes bursting with flavour. In terms of structure, though, it was a soggy mess. She did a credible job on it and the rest of us helped. I had a "frittura di paranza" (the waiter asked me if I knew what it was, and I reassured him), which resembled the fritto misto we had had in Venice, composed of whatever small fish were left in the nets after the big ones had been taken out. The kids enjoyed sampling the tiny fish and squid. A half-bottle of Falanghina went very well with everything.
We went back to the Metro station and took the train all the way over to Napoli Centrale to arrange our tickets back to Rome. The strike was over, the wickets were open, and the machines were all working again. The advantage of the machines was that we could use an English interface to specify exactly what we wanted. It went off without a hitch, including the feeding of L.100,000 notes into the slot, and we had our return reservations.
Back into the Metro and two stops over to Cavour, where we intended to try to catch a bus going up to the Museo di Capodimonte, to the north of the city. I had no information about buses; when I asked about it at the tourist office near Santa Chiaia, I was handed a useless little leaflet with a square table in it. You chose one of nine origins and a destination from the same list, and the table listed several bus combinations that would get you there -- without any indication of where to change. It seemed to me, though, that there should be a bus heading up Via Toledo to Capodimonte. Sure enough, at the first bus stop to the west of the Piazza, the 160 was listed as going there.
We waited in the shade of a construction hoarding. I kept going out to peek at the oncoming traffic, and a woman standing nearby asked N where we were going, and confirmed that we had the right bus, which furthermore she was going to board as well. We relaxed a bit. The bus came after about ten minutes, and we got on and even got seats.
We rode up Via Toledo (later I realized that a slight bend in Via Toledo gave them the excuse to rename it Via Santa Teresa degli Scalzi at that point) and up a switchback to a hill. I figured this must be close to Capodimonte, but couldn't see anything that looked like the museum, and didn't want to get off early lest we have to walk up the hill in full sun. Finally the woman who had spoke to us indicated that we should get off, we had missed our stop. We walked down a bit and arrived at the northern entrance of the park containing the museum.
At the entrance was one of those lemon ice carts, and we ordered four. The seller scraped them up, and then asked for L.8000 for the lot. This was about twice as much as it should have been, but since it was about ninety cents each, I didn't argue.
The museum was housed in yet another palazzo, this one a Farnese creation. It turned out to be quite a good collection of art. There were paintings the books had led us to expect: a Masaccio Crucifixion, a Filippo Lippi Annunciation, Titian's Danae, and another dramatic Caravaggio set off by itself in a small room. (There should have been more, but I suspect we had already seen them at the Rome exhibition.) But there were also unexpected surprises, notably Pieter Brueghel the Elder's "Parable of the Blind", which I had no idea was in this gallery. I stood and looked at it for quite a while.
In contrast to nearly all the other galleries we visited on the trip, this one had clearly continued to collect after the eighteenth century; there was a small but interesting collection of twentieth-century art on the top floor, including a Warhol Vesuvius. The kids, who had been drooping through the nineteenth-century rooms (who can blame them?), brightened up again when they saw the newer works. We also passed through some nice rooms, though the one entirely covered in porcelain was a bit over the top.
We exited through the main entrance to the park, found the nearest bus stop, and waited with a few locals for the 24 bus to take us down the hill. It took about half an hour to arrive; N and the kids amused themselves by watching the steady stream of traffic going by and seeing how many people were wearing seatbelts. Of the hundreds of cars that went by, only four had drivers who were.
We got seats on the 24 bus, though it filled up only a few stops later; it took us down to Piazza Carita, from which it was a short walk home. We rested, the kids played music, N did a hand laundry. The owner hadn't generated any laundry, but N didn't trust the cleaning woman to leave our stuff alone; she insisted on returning everything exactly to the position it had been in before, including putting a stool with a toilet paper roll and dentist reading material directly in front of the toilet so we couldn't sit down on it, and putting the kids' beds away so we had to pull them out again, even though no one was using their room. W called; he and P had invited us to dinner previously, and they would pick us up at 7:20. I went out to try to find wine and dessert, but failed utterly; no shops in the vicinity (including up on Spaccanapoli) seemed to sell anything more than the most basic of table wines, and when I stopped in at Scaturchio to try to buy their celebrated Torta Ministeriale, they said they didn't make it in summer. The woman behind the counter didn't offer anything in its place, the display case had nothing but the basic set of small pastries, and my Italian was not up to negotiating something suitable. So I returned home empty-handed.
We went down at the appointed time, and this time, we beat them to Piazza Bovio. The drive out was much like the one we had had the day before, slow at times, with fascinating traffic behaviour. They lived in a modern apartment block, set back from a busy street in Fuorigrotta; the driveway was barred by a gate which required manual unlocking. Their apartment was on the ground floor. It had a decent-sized kitchen, a storage room, two bedrooms, a living room, and two bathrooms. P's sister occupied one of the bedrooms (she was in her final year at the university in Napoli; the campus for the more traditional subjects was very close to our apartment, but the one for sciences was close to W and P's place).
P, mindful of the eating habits of our children, called us to the table almost immediately. We had prosciutto e melone to start, followed by fried swordfish steaks, and a selection of panfried contorni: zucchini, melanzane, peperoni. The wine was an Aglianico del Vulture, which didn't really go with fish, but it was from P's region, and I had remarked on how it was impossible to find in Canada, so P had bought a bottle. After, we moved to the living room, and had small glasses of a local anise-flavoured liqueur, plus sfogliatelle and baba al rum from a nearby pasticceria. These were not as good as the ones at Mary, but we appreciated them just the same.
W drove us back at a reasonable hour, and dropped us in Piazza Bovio.