March 1-3, 2017
Wednesday we got to the Museo Archeologico. This is where most of the gorgeous stuff taken from ancient Pompeii and Herculaneum is on display.
Beginning in the 18th century, excavations uncovered treasure after treasure, and all of them were taken to the collection of the Bourbon king of Naples.
The subway station for the museum houses a bronze group (a replica most likely) of Laocoon and his sons being strangled by the sea serpents. It is almost identical to the marble in the Vatican.
Laocoon is the skeptic who told the other Trojans to beware of the horse. He’s the one, according to Virgil, who said, “I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts.” That’s why the gods who were on the Greeks’ side sent the serpents to kill him. Killed his sons, too, because that’s what gods usually do.
The artifacts recovered from the digs at Pompeii and Herculaneum were combined later with a collection from Rome owned by the Farnese family.
The mother of one of the Neapolitan kings was the last of the Farnese line, which had included cardinals and Pope Paul III.
The Farnese collection, which occupies most of the ground floor, contains huge bronzes and marbles.
One very complex piece from ancient times is called the Farnese Bull. It is a group telling the story of Antiope’s revenge on Dirce, who had run away with Antiope’s husband. Antiope’s two sons are tying Dirce by the hair to a raging bull.
The piece is generally believed to have been carved in the fourth century A.D. Like the Venus Pudica in Syracuse, it has a baroque flavor. The artistic skill to do that would decline long before the final gasp of the Roman Empire and would take Europe more than a thousand years to recreate.
Another of the famous pieces in the Farnese collection is a large marble of Hercules, exhausted after completing his labors. For many years, the statue stood on legs that had been partly restored by an artist in the 16th or 17th century.
The original legs were discovered years later and eventually were reunited with the piece. The replacement legs are on display near the restored statue.
A stunning sculpture is Apollo with his lyre. It is one of the first you encounter coming into the Farnese Collection.
The robe that covers the body is carved from dark red porphyry to suggest intricate folds. The hands, feet, and head are white marble.
The parts are assembled to elegantly that you believe it is cut from a single block. Particularly intriguing is the way the wavy locks of hair fall over the shoulders.
It looks so delicate. How could somebody fit them together so tightly? And not even break something?
Venus Kallipygos (that is, Venus of the Beautiful Butt) is also stunning, both from the front ….
… and the back.
We took a break for pizza and a little bit of wine and then went back to the museum. As bad as the streets are, the food here is terrific. We went into a shiny little shop and had pizza with mozzarella made with water buffalo milk.
The wine was a decently tangy house red, which was indeed terrific at 3 euros for a quarter liter.
The top floor of the museum houses frescoes, artifacts, and sculpture from a Temple of Isis that stood in Pompeii. The collection is a detailed example of the tendency of the ancient religions to mix and match images and beliefs.
The Secret Room is no longer secret. It is on the mezzanine floor at the end of several rooms of frescoes, sculpture, and mosaics recovered mainly from the so-called House of the Faun at Pompeii.
The famous mosaic of Alexander defeating Darius, what’s left of it, is on a wall here. The floor of the house in Pompeii, where the original was, now has a reproduction.
Large parts of of the mosaic are missing. According to Rick Steeves’s guidebook, the damage done to the mosaic occurred when excavators removed it to Naples.
The mosaic is based on a much older painting, which apparently is known, so an illustration of the complete composition is shown alongside the fragmentary original.
The Secret Room, which at one time was open only to visitors who had written permission from the king of Naples, houses erotica retrieved from Pompeii and Herculaneum.
There are large stone and wooden phalluses that were protective talismans for shops and homes. They represented fertility and prosperity.
The original advertising illustrations from the Lupanarium of Pompeii are also there.
For dinner, we went back to the usual place, which I learned is called La Stanza del Gusto. Not only is the food good, but it is about as far as we are willing to walk in this neighborhood after dark.
Joanna had spaghetti with a sauce of codfish, vegetables, and bread.
Mine was bucatini with a tomato sauce that contained Sardinian cheese.
I thought they were both very good, but Joanna wasn’t so sure about her dish.
The red for the night was Piedirosso, from Cantine Federiciane in Campania. I took one sniff and a small taste and guessed that it was a blend that included a bit of Cabernet Sauvignon.
I asked the waiter about it, who went and checked. It is a varietal, and Piedirosso is the name of the grape,. Apparently it is native to the region.
A distinctive spicy smell and taste dominate Cabernet. Piedirosso has some of that, but is not as strong as in the Cab.
Thursday morning, the day before we left, I opened an e-mail from Ken, husband to Joanna’s sister Gladys. He had mentioned a great pizzeria in an earlier message and was following up with the full name, L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele.
I checked Google Maps and found that it was about a mile from the hotel. Better yet, the route would take us within a block of the Naples Duomo, which we hadn’t seen.
We needed to find Via dei Tribunali and follow that to Via Duomo. Much to my surprise, it was actually easy to do.
We walked Via Costantinopoli to the street with the arch. Instead of turning right, toward Piazza Dante, we turned left. It wasn’t called Tribunali there, but took us through a couple of piazzas before the street name changed.
The street is very narrow, without pedestrian walkways.
Narrower alleys branched off Tribunali and wound their way under balconies draped with drying laundry.
An occasional car would come through and everybody would have to get out of the way. Motorbikes were even worse, beeping in their annoying road-runner voices and weaving at speed among people on foot.
At times this seems to be a country overrun by undisciplined children.
The Duomo apparently commands a great deal of respect here. Either that or it is subjected to extraordinary maintenance. Only a small part of it has any graffiti.
It is baroque, as many churches are that we have seen on this trip. I imagine its roots run older, though.
An unexpected high point involves San Gennaro. This is the saint whose festival is celebrated every year in Little Italy in New York.
Gennaro was bishop of Naples and visiting Christian prisoners in a nearby town when he was arrested and beheaded during the persecutions by Diocletian. San Gennaro died within a year or two of St. Lucy.
I am fascinated by cults of relics. In Singapore, for instance, we went to a huge temple in Chinatown where a tooth of the Buddha, as well as vials holding some of his cremated remains, are on display.
The Duomo has a chapel called the Treasury of San Gennaro. It is full of silver objects, but the treasure, according to signs outside, are the relics of the saint.
A silver bust holds his head and some of his bones. There is a vial of his blood that alternately congeals and liquefies, and no one can explain why.
There is also a crypt below the cathedral’s high altar where a large vase holds more of San Gennaro’s bones.
I was walking around this place with my mouth open. Witnessing a tradition that goes back 1700 years can do that.
When we left the Duomo, we went back to Via dei Tribunali to find the Vico della Pace. It was next to a church, Santa Maria della Pace. So we had no trouble finding it.
Della Pace, a very narrow alley in which car and bike drivers like to make up for lost time, changes its name to Via Cesare Sersale, and Da Michele is at the very end of that, at Number 1.
There was a crowd of people outside when we got there. Joanna said, should we ask about getting a number?
No, that’s just the end of the lunch crowd, I said. So we went for a walk around the neighborhood to kill some time.
A large corso runs not far from the restaurant, and that was interesting enough, I guess. All corsos in this part of the world are named for one of the Vittorio Emanueles or an Umberto.
This one is named for Umberto I, the king who was assassinated in 1900.
We came back a half hour later and the crowd was still as big as before. So I went inside and spoke to man in a hat and apron, who told me the wait was an hour.
We got a ticket with number 39 on it. Several minutes later they called number 15.
I tried to wait. I really did. But I got tired of standing in a crowd of cigarette smokers and became annoyed at being shoved by people who can’t be bothered to speak.
There was a good-looking restaurant, D’Angeli, right across the street. We went there.
We had already had good pizza in Syracuse and great pizza in Naples. How much better can it get that it’s worth that kind of abuse for an hour?
The Margherita at D’Angeli was superb. Thick mozz (probably not water buffalo milk, but tasty nonetheless). Great red sauce dosed with oregano. Leaves of basil.
After we got there, Joanna told me she really hadn’t wanted pizza anyway. She has been crazy for all the pasta dishes we have been putting away.
I can understand that. I like to eat pizza once, maybe twice a week, when it’s good. I can eat pasta every day. Indeed, we have been eating pasta just about every day for the past month and a half.
Besides, Joanna saw a picture on the wall. I think it’s a classic comedian of Italian movies. The face is familiar, although I don’t recall the name.
He is shown holding a huge knot of pasta in one hand and nibbling on the strands. It triggered Joanna’s pasta craving.
She ordered the Sicilian pasta. That means it is made with eggplant.
The sauce, served on rigatoni, had a flavor I can’t identify. Maybe it was a strong hit of sage. Maybe this was some kind of eggplant that has a strong flavor. I don’t know.
Naples may be rotten to its core, but the food is great.
We took a cab back to the hotel and never did go out again.
Joanna had picked up a pear at a grocery store. We had bread in a paper bag left from D’Angeli, and a hard-boiled egg from breakfast.
We ate that around 9 p.m. and that’s all we could handle.
Moving day started at 7. We took a cab to the airport at 8:30 and had some breakfast there, coffee, croissant, hot water for Joanna.
I did some writing while we waited for the plane.
We took an hour-and-a-half flight to Munich that gave us a glimpse of the Bavarian Alps. Knowing we were headed for an airport with beer and sausages, I passed on the airplane food.
As usual when you change planes, especially at an airport you don’t know, your arrival and departure gates are as far apart as they can make them.
We traveled through people carriers to escalators and onto a subway train that took us to another terminal. More escalators and people movers to passport control.
We passed restaurants and duty-free shops and rode more people movers to yet another passport control point.
The man had my passport and boarding pass. Where can I get a beer and something to eat?
Nothing down there. We had to go back.
Lucky for us, there was a place not far away. I had a half liter of Paulaner with bratwurst. The man in front of me at the counter got the last weisswurst with a pretzel.
Everything was so good that I got another Paulaner.
We went back through the passport check and then came to yet another security post. The guy told us to hurry. They were almost finished boarding.
I knew he was lying. If they are really close to shutting the gate and you aren’t on board, they page you. Nobody had called our names.
We got onto the plane, which is less than half full, and watched several other people board after us.
I just finished a can of Warsteiner and am waiting for the drink cart to pass this way again. I’ll finish this later.
* * *
We got to Newark without incident, about a half hour ahead of the plane’s scheduled arrival time. I don’t know how that happened. Maybe the Jet Stream was slower today. Or maybe they forgot to fly over Iceland, and so wound up taking a short cut.
Anyway, we were back at Joanna’s house by 8 o’clock. Christopher was there.
He has been staying in Hancock, N.Y., a small town I know from the days when my parents lived in upstate New York.
He was in Montclair to welcome us home. He also prepared dinner. Besides a fantastic roast chicken, there were black beans and rice.
He had expected, quite correctly, that the food we had been eating for the past six weeks have been very good, but had not included black beans or jasmine rice.
I took off after dinner and am now back at my favorite New Jersey residence, La Quinta on Two Bridges Road in Fairfield.
Be well, all, and don’t lose your marbles.
Harry
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