Neapolitan Pizza is Not Chocolate and Strawberry

Naples, Italy

We had to get pizza in Naples, and it did live up to expectations (despite not being able to go to our first choice for lunch). 

We had worked up an appetite on a tour of the underground - old Greek and Roman wells, wartime shelters, an ampitheatre that was underneath varying degrees of modern buildings. Some passages were very narrow, requiring walking sideways, and we carried candles to light our way. Though we could have used a mobile phone like our guide, who spoke five languages and was still only in university. His English was near perfect, as apparently was his Swedish as he had lived in Sweden for six months and liked to do a thing he described as flat skiing (he could remember how to say it in Swedish and Italian, but not English). 

Walking around the streets of Naples was a bit harrowing. I thought that of all the places we'd been, we were most likely to be mugged there. But we weren't, not even a little, and though we had to wait out on the street for our turn to be able to get pizza, nobody pickpocketed us either. The pizza place claimed to be one of the oldest pizza places in Naples, and only made two types of pizza, but they made them well. 

We visited the archeological museum of Naples, and were dismayed to find that the fresco section was closed that day as well as some other sections. Unfortunate, but we had to go considering every other sentence in the audio guide for Pompeii said that the fresco/sculpture/mosaic that was there is now "in the archeological museum of Naples". As well as impluviums and compluviums, this was his most repeated phrase. 

I cannot remember who this guy was, but Yannick liked his expression. He has what I like to call 'Cheerios hair', which is lots of little ringlets that make his hair look like someone tipped a bowl of Cheerios out over it. 

A statue of Marcus Aurelius as a youth. I am trying to capture his bored expression. (Though he seems to have droopy eyes in most sculptures, so that may have just been how his face looked.)

There were many mosaics from Pompeii and Herculaneum, some of them very detailed. 

Here is the mosaic of Alexander the Great fighting off the Persian king Darius. Difficult to imagine that I studied this in school and university, and there it is. The house that this mosaic was found in took up a whole block in Pompeii, and was quite an elaborate habitation.

The metro, we discovered, didn't work. Or more accurately, we would not figure out how to work it. And the most useful bits were still under construction. Despite this, we found our way around just fine and managed to get a train back to Pompeii and our campground.