Naples, Not for Beginners 01/01/20 Day 8

Napoli, Not For Beginners

Come to Naples, they may say. 

Stay in the luxurious San Pietro Hotel within walking distance to the train station, they may say. 

Naples, they may say, is like nothing you've ever experienced with your family before.

Looking for the kind of trip that will bring you and your kids closer together? Look no further than Napoli, they may say.

From The McGehee's Abroad to you and yours, trust us when we say, you could go to your local ghetto for a fraction of the price and come away with a comparable experience to traveling 6,453 miles to see Naples firsthand. In other words, go most anywhere else in the world with your family, and skip Naples. Want to see Pompeii? Okay, okay. Stay somewhere else and travel a greater distance rather than setting up your tent in this town.

Our day started off pretty good for having gone to bed at a reasonable New Year's Eve 2AM and up by 7:30Am. Flight to Rome and then a subsequent flight to Naples. The idea being we would not skip out on Pompeii. In fact, we would stay one night in Naples, see Pompeii the next morning and then take a train back to Rome and then on and on until we have made our way up to Venice. The goal being we would see a lot of Italy before going off to Slovenia and then finally home. No plan is perfect.

Zero meals between 8:30AM and 5:30PM can make the best and most experienced travelers grumpy. Add a two-hour walk through the filthy streets of Naples looking for restaurants open before their dinner hour (7PM), and try not to lose your mind. For as dilapidated as Greece was, it was not filthy. For as rank as California's homeless crisis is through the tent cities, Naples is still worse. No picture can describe the poor condition of Naples. 

Naples has a lot of apartments along the cobblestone streets. Each building is guarded by a heavy steel door with a padlock of sorts. Each door is graffitied, not necessarily by design. One Italian walked into one of these gateways, the door squealed shut with a thud, and then no less than six interior locks engaged on the other side. Madeline and I turned to each other and she said, "You heard that too right?" We have never been so close as a family as when walking through Naples.

No matter how long and how far we walked the scenery never changed. The filth never lessened. Although New Year's Eve could account for some of the waste piling up in every corner of the city, the graffitied churches, walls, statues and restaurants were not part of a mystique or an organized civil protest, it was just evidence that Naples is Italy's dirty little secret and our poor little hotel is trying very hard to reflect the good old days, the hey day, the time before Anarchy ensued. Tough spot to be in. Inform customers and lose business; keep the streets in the streets and out of the brochures and when customers arrive, they post blogs warning others to stay away from Naples, and still lose business. Catch 22. 

If these Coca-Cola bottles represented what we expected versus what we encountered then let Nolan's artwork on the left indicate Naples as it really is. 

Looking forward to saying, Arrivederci to Naples as soon as possible. But first, we are still looking forward to Pompeii in the morning.