Wednesday 15/02/2023.
As soon as we arrived in Naples, we knew we were going to die.
We wanted to spend our 40th birthday in the ruins of Pompeii. We love history and old buildings and have watched so many documentaries about Pompeii and Herculaneum. It was time to experience them. So we planned a trip to include both towns, and a scenic drive around the Amalfi coast.
First stop: Naples
Naples lured us with the promise of catacombs, a castle and its proximity to Pompeii, but we didn’t actually know much about it, other than there’s a sunken city off the coast of Baia. Naples is best described as “an experience.”
But first, we had to get there. We always do the 6 a.m. flights, which means leaving our house at midnight and driving to the airport for roughly 3:30 a.m., which means no sleep for 24 hours. The M4 had closures, but it didn’t delay us. While Cardiff has an international airport, it doesn’t fly direct to many countries and is three times the price of London airports. It’s infuriating. Higher fares and 11 hour journey times for a 2 hour flight is not appealing, so instead of the 40 minute drive to our local airport, we have to do a 3.5 hour drive to London.
Blade Runners
In Stansted airport, we parked opposite a shuttle bus stop then watched the shuttle bus depart as we unloaded our cases from our van. So far, not good. After a freezing fifteen minute wait, we caught the next bus. Security can be challenging. One of us gets patted down or wiped for drugs. This time, Lynx’s coffin-shaped suitcase caused the issue. The silver bat motif on the case flagged the security system, which thought it was a blade. Yet that same system allowed Cat’s identical suitcase through. The guard sighed as he realised what the issue was, and apologised for having to search the case. We shrugged in commiseration. Our boots have spikes on, we are a security menace.
Stand Sted
While we like Stansted airport, we despise the selfish spunktrumpets who use it. People sleep stretched out over multiple chairs or benches, not caring that this forces others to either stand, or sit on the floor. Everyone is tired at 3.a.m. You’re not special. If you have to sleep, curl up so you take up less room. Apparently, slamming suitcases onto their heads in insomnia-induced fury is considered “illegal” and “Grievous Bodily Harm.”
We caught the shuttle train to our gate, but the escalator wasn’t working. A worker got our attention and showed us where the lift was. He didn’t show anyone else. There didn’t seem to be a separate queue for priority boarding, but that didn’t stop other users queue jumping us. The flight was quick and we slept for the first time that night/morning.
Meeting the Captain
In Aeroporti di Napoli, our suitcase was the first on the baggage carousel. We headed out to the shuttlebus for rental cars. A driver who didn’t speak English, told us we had to phone for our rental company, Autovia. Luckily, we’d been learning Italian on Duolingo so understood him. Autovia sent a mini bus to collect us – a process which should have been quick, yet took forever. Picking up the rental car took at least half an hour, despite the fact we were the only customers in the office. Nobody seemed in any hurry to get it over with. That should have forewarned us using this company was a mistake.
Our car was a beautiful gunmetal grey Peugeot 2008, which we named Il Capitano. Our Peugeot Partner Tepee is named Chief Prancing Bear, so this car needed a rank. There was one snag: we couldn’t find the handbrake. We drive old cars, and even when we’ve bought new ones, the handbrake is in the usual place. Unable to face the embarrassment of returning to the rental shack and asking where the handbrake was, we googled it. It was a switch which you pressed. That seems counter productive to using the handbrake lever in an emergency should the brakes fail. Or maybe we’ve been driving old, unreliable cars for too long.
Highway to Hell
Suitably humbled, we drove out of the car park and into a gladiatorial arena of cars. Il Capitano drove like a dream, but he was the only one who did. No road markings, no rules, no care for life. Nobody stopped at junctions, roundabouts, zebra crossings (even if there were people on them) or red lights. Scooters drove at us from all directions, a cacophony of horns warning of their approach. If we dared to follow the highway code at all, people overtook us, blasted their horns, and seemed genuinely angry that we wanted to live. Pedestrians walked out in front of you, and nobody gave way to ambulances. We even saw someone cut up an ambulance.
Will Il Capitano survive the next five days? We’ve been driving for nearly 25 years. We’ve never encountered anything like this. Luckily this wasn’t our first experience of driving abroad. We’d hired a car in Spain in 2017 in Fuengirola and drove through the Spanish mountains. Our time spent on Dodgems as kids served us well in Naples.
Palazzo Caracciolo di Girifalco
We video called our mum and sister so they could enjoy our first drive with us. Our mum was glad our travel insurance included repatriation. We made it to our hotel, which was apparently only two miles from the airport. A ten minute drive. We dread to think how many near death experiences we suffered in those two endless miles.
Parking Wars
Hotel Ginevra is a 1 star hotel, situated on Via Genova, and one of the best budget hotels in Naples. It was founded in 1955 and is family-run by the Di Lorenzos. Cars littered the pavements, blocking corners and junctions. Wherever there was a hint of a space, there was a car or scooter parked in it. So this is why our hotel was such a steal. We drove around the streets a few times, our blood pressure rising with each near-collision, before finally admitting defeat and going to one of the places on our list to calm down.
San Gennaro
Our first port of call was the San Gennaro catacombs. The original catacomb dates back to the 2nd C. It is believed to have been a noble family’s tomb, before being extended for the community. It was expanded in the 4th C following St Agrippinus’s internment. He was the first patron of Naples. The catacombs are named after San Gennaro, the bishop of Benevento. In 305AD, he was arrested for professing the Christian faith, and beheaded in Pozzuoli. His remains were stolen or moved for centuries until returning to Naples in 1497.
The catacombs are on two levels and carved out of the yellow tuff which lies beneath Naples. The lighting system gives the catacombs a cosy golden glow. Getting to them involves descending a glass staircase into the upper catacombs. There are approximately 3,000 burials in the catacombs. Not all of it has been excavated, so the real number is probably higher.
Hierarchy of death
The catacombs have three types of tombs: the terragne, for poor people who were buried in the ground; loculi, rectangular tombs placed in the walls for the middle class; and arcosoli, tombs with an arched shape for the rich, who had frescos or mosaics decorating their final resting places. Napoleon ordered all the bones moved to Fontanelle Cemetery because he thought the catacombs were unhygienic. All that remains now are empty graves and disappointment. Still, they were beautiful. Square recesses scar the walls where workers inserted wooden posts as temporary steps to inter bodies in the higher niches.
The lower catacombs is older and better preserved, with a large baptismal font in the entrance. Bishop Paul 11 commissioned the font in 762-766 A.D. It was once covered in marble. The ceilings in the lower cathedral reach up to 6 metres high. One of the most famous and prettiest frescos depicts a beautiful peacock in a garden.
San Gaudioso
Our tickets allowed us two tours, so after San Gennaro, we walked to the Catacombs di San Gaudioso, which are the second largest in Naples. The first part of these catacombs were built between the 4th and 6th C AD. We befriended a south American woman from our tour so joined with her to find the catacombs. The next tour didn’t start for 45 minutes so we refuelled with some Red Bull from a corner shop.
The second tour took us to the Basilica Santa Maria della Sanita, which was stunning.
The baroque basilica was built above the catacombs to protect them. The basilica has high vaulted ceilings, marble flooring and two spiral polychrome marble staircases leading to a large altar and pulpit containing an organ. Beneath the staircase is the spacious entrance to the catacombs. Marble squares in the floor mark where they used to lower the bodies through for draining. Carved skulls now adorned the floor where the drainage channels were.
Preparing the dead
We headed below the church into the catacombs. The general belief at the time was flesh was sinful, so men lowered the bodies through drainage channels in the church floor. They placed the bodies in cavities called Seditoi, where the Schiattamuorto then drained the bodies’ fluid. They placed a vessel beneath the deceased to collect the fluid. They’d put holes in the bodies, break their arms and legs and stuff them into niches until they’d drained them before they went to their eternal rest in the catacombs, with their skulls wedged into little holes in walls lining the ambulatory, or corridor.
The central ambulatory is 30 metres long. They viewed the head as sacred because it was the seat of thinking. They painted a fresco with deceased’s clothing, depicting their profession beneath the head. The frescos were divided, with male on the left of the ambulatory, female on the right. The fresco painter, Giovanni Balducci, refused payment in exchange for being buried amongst the aristocrats in the catacombs. That is the definition of working for exposure.
Culture Shock
Fontanelle Cemetery was next on our itinerary, but it was closed for restoration, ruining our plans. We walked there anyway to see if we could see it. We got lost and retraced our route up a steep hill. The cemetery has big steel gates so we couldn’t see in. That left us with a 25 minute walk of defeat back to the car. Scooters with families of four whizzed past, some babies tucked under their mother’s arms. One rider held a Yorkshire terrier dangling from its harness, and delivery riders held trays of coffees, managing not to spill a drop as they traversed the cobbled streets.
Naples smells. It’s dirty and noisy and quite unlike any other place we’ve visited. The constant noise of vehicles, horns and people yelling, meant we were in a permanent state of overstimulation. People left their houses and dumped bags of rubbish on the pavements. Bins overflowed from uncollected rubbish, litter skittering down every street. Homeless people slept in doorways. This was not the Naples we’d seen on TV travel programmes.
Mob Rule
It’s one of the oldest inhabited cities, originally under Greek rule in the second millennium BC, but now under the rule of a local mafia-type organisation, the Camorra. The Camorra is one of the oldest and largest criminal organisations in Italy, dating back to the 18th C, primarily dealing in drug trafficking, racketeering, counterfeiting and money laundering. They’re also responsible for waste management. We may criticise Cardiff Council a lot, but at least they have regular bin day. After we’d posted a photo of the rubbish to social media, one of our friends informed us about mafia-type ruling. Apparently, at the end of the month, the rubbish is removed from the city and burned. That doesn’t sound in-keeping with the Paris Agreement.
Space Invader
We returned to our hotel and after a couple of laps of the side streets, got a space outside. Parking was free until 8 a.m. A scooter tried to nick our space, but we were tired, stressed and learning the Neapolitan ways of driving aggressively. Il Capitano was bigger than the scooter and we won the parking wars. The Hotel Ginevra is painted a peachy orange, though the paint is faded and peeling. The staircase looks like pale grey marble. The hotel is amongst residential buildings, so the hotel is on the second floor.
We lugged our cases up four flights of stairs, not hopeful that the hotel would match the images from Booking.com. We were wrong. Our room was painted a lovely bright green and we were excited to discover a mini fridge. Despite its outward appearance, inside was clean and beautiful. It only has a 2.9 rating on Trip Advisor, but those people are probably used to posh hotels with room service and a mini bar. We’re used to sleeping in our van or squeezing multiple people into one Travelodge room. It fares better on Booking.com with a 7.3 rating. After a few minutes of much-needed stretching, we headed out for somewhere to eat.
Open Door
Walking the streets at night didn’t feel overly safe and it was clear we weren’t in an expensive area. After half a mile, we found an empty restaurant, La Porta Aperta, and between Duolingo and Google translate, we managed to order chips. They were delicious and well worth the slightly anxious walk. There were incredible street art murals on shop shutters. After eating, we went to photograph the Porta Capuana, and somehow walked in a complete circle, ending up back at the ancient city gate. It was built in 1484 during Ferdinand I of Aragon’s reign, and marks the north eastern boundary of Naples’s Centro Storico. This may not be the Naples that the Tourist Board wants you to see, but we got to see its beating, bloody heart, not its painted face.
Read Day 2.
Read Day 2.