Naples

We were up early today to make our way to Naples. While I have loved a lot of the sights in Rome, I haven't been fussed on Rome itself as it is such a dirty city and very crowded. I was happy we were moving on. Well we should have stayed in Rome because Naples is so much worse.

We had heard Naples wasn’t the best place to visit but after watching a documentary on the underground tunnels and reading about the lovely Christmas street and shopping street in old Naples we thought we would add it to our agenda. What a mistake!!

After getting ripped off by the taxi driver, we had to climb four flights of stairs with our luggage to get to our accommodation. We were early so we tentatively left our bags there and went to explore the streets. There is something about Naples that just doesn't feel right. There is almost a feeling of menace.

We lined up to do the Underground tour we had heard about but decided to give it a miss when we saw how many people would be on the tour. Being crammed in a small tunnel with so many people was not appealing.

We tried to give Naples a go and walked around the streets (there were a couple of cool statues) and checked out some churches, but it was in general just a grubby place to be. Rubbish piled up everywhere, everything (including the churches) covered in graffiti, and lots of gypsies selling stuff, lots of just tacky stores selling tat. The so called Christmas street which supposedly featured beautiful decorations and nativity scenes was just shop after shop of dull, dull, dull and tacky items. No Christmas spirit here.

We managed to find a nice place for lunch, a lovely cafe down a side street that had made an effort to make their laneway a respite from the “real” Naples. It was lovely and the food was delicious, a great find.

After lunch we decided to return to our room and in the end we stayed there until we left early the next morning. It didn't help that we were starting to feel homesick and this place was not condusive to encouraging us about the rest of our trip. This is not a town I would recommend to anyone and we were very happy to be leaving it.Read more