The weekend began with sheep. Our assistant director took Hope (my co-tutor) and I to the train station right after camp, and we got on our first of two trains up to Salerno (near Naples). But a TrenItalia worker came up to us and told us that the train would be late, because they were waiting for sheep. Apparently there was a car of sheep heading our way that had to join with our two-car train. So, I called my heroic host family, who came and drove us 30 minutes to our transfer station (where I was stuck for a couple hours last weekend). My host dad is a caribinieri (police-type organization), so he was driving about twice the speed limit. But we made it with plenty of time to spare.
We made Salerno our base, more specifically a convent-turned-hostel that worked out well. It's a pretty town, but we really only saw it when walking to/from the train station or port.
On Saturday morning we went to Pompei. It was on my bucket list for the summer, mostly because when I took an art history class before Prague, I saw the bright red paintings from there. But I was excited about the ruins, too. I know the basic story of what happened at Pompei, why it's preserved, etc. but I still, for whatever reason, did not expect it to be a full city. Until I got the map when we walked in. And it's like, a real city. With streets and neighborhoods. Unreal. This is a picture of one of the main streets. We walked around for four hours and maybe saw a quarter of the city.
And I did indeed find that red. While most of the city was just stone, some was still covered in pieces of red wall, and many of the remaining buildings had red artwork inside. Most of the surviving paintings are in a museum in Naples.
We then took a train into Naples (or Napoli as they call it here). Naples has an interesting reputation. I'd heard that it's industrial, dirty, and dangerous. We got out of the train station and for the first 10 minutes all of that seemed completely accurate. But then. We noticed that the street was shut down and there were a bunch of caribinieri and other security personnel in the street. I asked someone what was going on, but no one seemed to know. So we kept walking. Was Berlusconi in town? Was it a parade? Soon we heard a parade. I thought... it's June... could it be?
It was Italy's National Pride Parade!!!!! I'd missed it by one day in Rome last year, and had no idea where it would be this year. But we went to the right city, at the right time, and were walking down the RIGHT STREET. Crazy. We watched/danced for an hour and collected all of the chachkas we could. It was incredible. Gay organizations from most of Italy's regions marched, and lots of random groups, too (including Young Democrats and Communists).
We wandered around the beautiful part of Naples for a couple hours. I bought an shirt with English that made no sense (a goal of mine since last winter) and we found a really cute block of cafes where we sat and had wine and bruschetta (and sadly it started to rain).
And then there was pizza. Naples is the epicenter of pizza, especially margherita (cheese) pizza. And we ate at the birthplace of that. It was pretty tasty. To be 100% honest, I did find the dough to be a bit salty, but the tomato sauce was absolutely perfect. And the mozzarella was damn good, too. Every meal we ate during the weekend was some variation of bread, cheese, and tomatoes.
Sunday was the Amalfi Coast. Also on my summer bucket list. I'd seen pictures, and I had to go. We took a ferry to Positano, which is in the middleish of the coast. I had imagined that the famous towns were all right next to each other in one section of the coast, but they're actually really spread out. We picked a good one.
The ride was absolutely beautiful. This is a picture of us when we were docked in the town of Amalfi on our way to Positano. Upon arrival, the entire top deck of our ferry was staring up at the beautiful buildings glued to the cliffs. But not because they were beautiful buildings glued to cliffs. There was a man showering in a home pretty far up the cliff, and he had a huge window facing the coast. So everyone could see. Pretty funny.
We just started walking up. Every time we turned around we had to stop, because neither of us had been anywhere this beautiful before. It looked like a Greek Islands town, but with a range of color instead of the blue/white.
For lunch we had delicious gnocchi sorrentina (gnocchi, mozzarella, tomatoes) overlooking the beach, where we spent our last couple hours in the town.
There's not too much else I can say, so here's another picture from Positano.
I'll post soon about how the camp is going, I just couldn't put off writing about the weekend!
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