[Chris’s note: this one’s in English only, sorry! It’s also insanely late. Uh … sorry about that, too!]

We arrived in Naples without any trouble and exited the train station, where we immediately ran into the most stereotypical Italian scene I think I’ve ever seen: a taxi station utterly backed up with dozens of cabs because at the front, a group of angry drivers (all male) were standing in a circle, screaming at each other and making wild hand gestures while the other drivers honked and leaned out of their window to also scream. Finally one of the drivers seemed to have enough of fighting about … whatever … and he waved us over to his cab, much to the consternation of several others. We hopped in and told him we wanted to go to the airport. More specifically, we wanted to go to the rental car pickup, because unlike Rome, you can’t really get around Naples and (especially) its suburbs without driving. This is unfortunate, since driving in Southern Italy is one of the worst activities I’ve ever engaged in that doesn’t actually cause physical pain. But more on that later!

Things I’d looked up online told me that it should be about €12-15 from the train station to the airport. Naturally, our driver charged us €25. When we protested, he showed us a chart that we couldn’t really read as evidence. Eventually we gave up and paid him, and he gave me some change (more on that later, too). We found our rental car kiosk and requested a Fiat 500 because, hey, it’s Italy. They gave us a brand new charcoal grey Fiat 500 with roughly 37 horsepower under the hood, and off we went into the lawless hellscape of Neapolitan driving!

Our lodging for this trip was an AirBnB in the hills overlooking the city of Castellammare di Stabia and its bay. I have nothing but positive things to say about the place, except that getting up the driveway was a challenge. Other than that, it was clean, nice, comfortable, and run by a very friendly gentleman. The view was extraordinary, and the grounds were lovely. Five stars, would stay again … if we ever went back, which we absolutely never will.

After getting settled we decided to explore Castellammare di Stabia, especially since GELATO EVERY DAY was calling, and it was already early afternoon. This is where we first began to really appreciate the truth about the greater Naples area: it is a stark contrast between lovely scenery and struggling neighborhoods full of run-down buildings. From a distance, Castellemmarre is beautiful. Up close, most of it looks like this:

The town is full of half-finished construction projects that have left piles of debris lying all over the place. Things like their gorgeous metal and glass gazebo have been walled off with rusting chickenwire because the floor is in such disrepair as to be dangerous. The “beach” you can see in distance shots is actually an expanse of algae-covered gravel that can’t be reached anyway due to the aforementioned piles of construction rubble. Many of the buildings look like they were last painted in the sixties, and the most common look you get from the locals as you walk through the place can charitably be described as “surly”. The traffic lights have all been turned off, as if some previous government tried them as an experiment, saw that the local populace had no intention of paying them any attention, and gave up (this is not an exaggeration – literally none of them work … and this was the case in every town outside of Naples proper). Driving is a case of “everyone does whatever they want, whenever they want, on roads that were built for horses and now have parked cars lining both sides” — it’s a lot like Providence, actually, if everyone in Providence was angry, on meth, driving jerky standard-shift cars, and there were no stop signs, traffic signals, or signs of law enforcement of any type.

I apologize if this is coming off as a rant, or if it seems like I’m ragging on the town because it wasn’t beautiful enough, but I sort of want to record my thoughts for posterity here. I have never been anywhere as perplexing as the southern Italian coast. It’s a place that I simultaneously disliked more than anywhere else I’ve ever been and which made me tense and unhappy much of the time, and a place that I found extraordinarily beautiful and relaxing, depending on where we were and what were were doing within it.

GELATO EVERY DAY nearly came to a sad end in Castellammare, as all we could find were “bars” outside of which were advertised various prepackaged frozen novelties and from within which angry-looking Italian guys in their sixties glared at us (the Italian concept of a bar seems to be one part convenience store, one part coffee shop, one part tobacco dispensary, one part actual bar, and in some cases one part rehabilitation home for ex-convicts). We nearly gave up, but decided to push on one more block, where we found … a gelateria! The service was grudging and the gelato mediocre, but we’d saved the tradition, and that’s what matters! We headed back to the car, and on to more pleasant pastures, specifically: the next town over, Vico Equense.

Set up on the Italian cliff-side, Vico Equense is a nice little town full of restaurants, coffee shops, and hotels. I wouldn’t call it beautiful, but it’s picturesque, and its views of the Mediterranean are spectacular. Charlotte and I wandered the town for a bit, grabbed drinks on a local hotel terrace overlooking the sea, and then enjoyed a very nice dinner at a restaurant our AirBnB host had recommended to us. It was a pleasant evening after an afternoon that had left me, at least, wondering if we’d made a mistake when choosing our destination for this trip.

On Thursday, we slept in. Again. This was the “relaxation” part of our vacation, and we saw no reason not to indulge in that aspect. Anyway, it was raining in the morning. Once we were up and showered and ready to go, we hopped into the car and headed back into Castellammare. We were determined to see a bit more of the town and what it had to offer, and had done some research to find its nicer sections. We did indeed arrive in one of these, and though we still got a lot of odd looks, we were able to find a very nice restaurant with an extremely friendly waiter in which to have lunch. Fully sated, we decided it was time to really see what we’d come here for: the coast.

I will give both the Sorrento and the Amalfi coasts this: they may be the most naturally beautiful places I’ve ever been in my entire life, including Hawaii and the Caribbean. The cliff-sides are stunning, the Mediterranean is a vast turquoise expanse, and the little clusters of houses here and there are impossibly picturesque, especially from a distance (as with everything else around Naples, they suffer a bit when you get up close). Sorrento itself is large enough to be interesting, and we stopped there and took a few walks around the town. Our first walk got us neither to the sea nor to any commercial districts, but our second attempt managed both. We first stopped for GELATO EVERY DAY, and it was here that I had the enjoyable experience of being informed that the ten-euro note with which our cab driver from the train station had rendered change was, in fact, an obvious counterfeit. On inspection, it was clearly inkjet printing on regular paper, with some foil embossing stickers atop it. To the gelato server’s credit, she didn’t seem to think I was trying to rip her off, but rather looked embarrassed that she had to tell this obviously American tourist he’d been ripped off. Fortunately we had other money, all of it real, and were able to pay her.

We took our gelato and headed in the direction of the sea. After a long walk down a very pretty, tree-lined thoroughfare, we ended up at a small city park overlooking the Mediterranean. It was really lush and verdant, and the waters were a beautiful turquoise. Look upon the flickr gallery and despair … that you weren’t there, because seriously it was gorgeous.

After the park, we decided it was time to get serious about getting to the Amalfi Coast. Charlotte has wanted to see it for much of her life, and there was no sense waiting any longer! We cut across the peninsula and headed for the winding route ss163. Driving the twisting, curving, tight coastal road is alarming, but also a lot of fun, and it’s fascinating to see people living and working in little villages that hug the cliff-sides. I have no idea how one runs to the grocery store in such places, but they seem to make it work!

We weaved in and out of tiny cliff-side villages for about two hours, stopping in the middle to have a drink and take in some local atmosphere, which mainly involved watching a whole bunch of middle-aged guys lean against a wall and chat. Our final destination for the evening was the town of Amalfi itself, a multi-tiered pseudo-paradise overlooking a wide turquoise bay. By this time, night had fallen, and we were starving, so we parked the car, looked up a well-reviewed local restaurant that sat at the edge of (and actually slightly over) the bay, and proceeded to have a very nice meal. This was followed by another set of crazy curves, this time in the dark, as we drove into the mountains–climbing and climbing far above the ocean, and then descending the other side–in order to cross the peninsula and get back to our AirBnB.

Friday was ruins day. Naples and its suburbs lie near Mt. Vesuvius, which famously blew its top nearly two thousand years ago, in CE 79, burying the towns of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and several others under tons of superheated ash and bathing them in poisonous gasses. It was not a good time for anyone involved, and for hundreds of years the towns remained buried, with new cities eventually being built atop them. There was one silver lining to a very large dark cloud, though: when they were rediscovered, the ruins contained countless well-preserved frescoes, mosaics, and objects both aesthetic and utilitarian. Much of the best stuff has been moved to museums, but the ruins (and some of the painting/mosaics) are still there.

We started with Herculaneum [Flickr gallery], which is substantially smaller than Pompeii. At the time of its destruction, it sat on the sea’s edge, but the sea is now about half a kilometer away. The town was built on several layers, and we got to explore its cobblestone streets and climb around amidst its ruins, including its large and still partially buried baths and gymnasium, learning bits about the daily life of Italians in the first century. The place is not big; you can walk across it in a matter of minutes, but it’s densely packed with ruined dwellings, and we spent a good bit of time there before deciding that the crowds were too much.

Headed for Pompeii, we stopped at a local coffee shop for GELATO EVERY DAY, which was so melted and flavorless that Charlotte took one spoonful, refused to eat the rest, and refused to count it as her daily ration. Disappointed but resolute, we made our way to Pompeii, which involved an insane amount of cursing at local drivers on my part, to the point that by the time we got to the ruins, all I really wanted to do was go home.

I’m glad we didn’t; Pompeii [Flickr gallery] was as peaceful and open as Herculaneum was crowded and constrained. Much, much larger, there was more space in which the crowds could spread out, and we wandered the ruins at leisure, taking in many sights. Favorites included: the active vineyards interspersed between the two-thousand-year-old buildings, the amphitheater, the gardens, and an amazing mansion with intact and elaborate mosaic floors, protected by a carpet, off which people kept stepping, to the (very loud) annoyance of the woman who’d been assigned to watch over the building.

As the sun began to set, we made our way back to the park entrance, and headed once again toward Vico Equense. We wanted to stop for drinks first, and I realized I hadn’t had a glass of grappa the entire time I was in Italy, so I remedied that with a nice, aged selection. Afterward, there was a pizza place there we’d been told we had to try, and it turned out to be a highly worthwhile experience. Not only was the pizza itself quite tasty, but the people watching was magnificent. The restaurant, Pizza a Metro, bills itself as “the university of pizza” and, indeed, it’s about the size of a university dining hall, easily seating a couple hundred people. You’d think in a town the size of Vico Equense, this would be financial suicide, but the place was booming when we arrived, and stayed that we for our entire visit. Everyone from regal-looking elderly folks having dinner together, to massive families with kids, to young couples on dates, and beyond was apparently in the mood for Friday night pizza, the delivery of which is done with massive rolling trays, on which the pizzas are hastily slashed into pieces and left for you to devour at your leisure.

Finished with dinner, we realized that Charlotte’s GELATO EVERY DAY streak was in serious jeopardy, so we wandered around Vico Equense, hoping for the best. We managed to find a cafe that had gelato, although the lady running the place had turned off all the lights in that part of the store. Still, she flipped ’em back on and served us (yes, I had a second gelato … vacation, right?). This one was much better than the one from the afternoon, and thus the streak was saved! We retired to our AirBnB, did a little packing up in prep for departure the next day, and crashed.

Our final half-day in Naples saw us leaving the AirBnb and heading for the city. We had a few hours to kill, so we’d decided to hit the museum of history, which houses most of the best stuff removed from Herculaneum and Pompeii (that wasn’t looted by other countries). This is where things went to hell; after four days of utterly harrowing driving without a scratch on our rental car, I was defeated by the entrance to a parking garage. We were in one of Naples’s many fabulous “roads” that are roughly the width of a half-bathroom, and an attempt to turn left into the garage ended with the whole front passenger side of the car all crunched up. Turns out I’d mistaken the garage attendant’s shout of “For god’s sake, stop!” (translated roughly from the Italian) for “Come ahead, you got this!”

I was not happy. In fact I was in one of the worst moods in which I’ve ever found myself. Three days of dealing with southern Italy had left me tense and stressed out, and this capped it. I’m not proud to admit that I shouted some profanity (not at the garage dude — wasn’t his fault) and punched a stone wall hard enough that my entire hand puffed up … it took two months for it to stop hurting. Once I was done having my tantrum, we went and got coffee. Charlotte went looking for antiseptic wipes–repeatedly punching a filthy stone wall both cuts up your hand pretty good and covers it in grime–and I sat in the corner of the café staring at a wall, hating everyone in Italy, including myself. Sorry, this is a dark paragraph. It gets better.

Eventually we decided that, screw it, we were a block from the museum so we might as well go, since it’d be better than sitting at the airport for several hours. This proved to be a good idea (even though, as it turns out, the Naples airport is by a wide margin the nicest thing we saw in the entire city). The museum was calm, cool, and quiet, which is exactly what I needed to calm down. By the time we were done there, I was ready to get back in the car and continue on. If we’d tried to leave right after the accident, there’s a very real possibility I would’ve ended up in another, worse accident, or some kind of road rage incident.

We spent about forty-five minutes at Hertz, filling out damage forms and waiting for their insanely slow computer to tell us what we owed. Turns out it was about €550, which was about €1500 less than what I’d expected them to charge me. I paid it, and am still (months later) wrangling with Visa to find out if the protection on my card is going to reimburse me anything. Hopefully someday! Anyway, we headed to the airport, got through security, and found ourselves in a nice, wide open place with lots of good shops and restaurants. It was the perfect time for GELATO EVERY DAY, the final one of the trip, and we ended up sitting on some weird leather settees, enjoying our ice cream and waiting for our flight. Eventually it arrived, and we were whisked back to Paris.

So … that’s the story of our Southern Italy trip. It’s taken me like two months to finish writing this blog post, since which we’ve returned to the US and resumed our life in Providence. Charlotte–who, it should be noted, does not share my opinions and didn’t find it nearly so objectionable–recently asked me if my opinion on Southern Italy had softened with a little time and perspective.

The answer is that it has not. While I’m glad we went, and I saw some amazing stuff while we were there, and I do have some good memories from the place, I don’t think there’s any likelihood that I will ever return to Naples or the surrounding area, and I’m honestly in no rush to revisit Rome. I’ve been all over the world, and visited plenty of cities and countries with different customs or behaviors, and dealt with it, but … sometimes a place just doesn’t work for a certain person. Although there were many moments I enjoyed thoroughly, overall, Southern Italy didn’t work for me. Live and learn!