Sorrento is Beautiful and Life Here is Good, But So Different

Here are some pictures I took around town . This is a great place to spend a month, and it is not crowded here now. It is hot in the afternoon, but cool in the morning and in the evening.

  

It is also interesting to live a typical Italian life style.  After class we have lunch and by the time we are finished the entire town is closed. Almost nothing is open between 2 and 5, so we come home, relax, and do our homework. We have no internet connection in our apartment (and no oven, no toaster, and no washer/dryer and no garbage disposal either--and 2 minutes of hot water per shower), so sometimes we go back to school to use the wireless there. Around 7 we go out and do errands (not much shopping yet, but I am weakening) and enjoy walking around, and dinner is never started before 8:30 or 9.  Most people eat around 9 or 9:30.  The town stays up way later then I do—I come home after dinner and try and review for the next day before I pass out. Liz often stays out when I come home.  It takes some getting used to—for example, our clothes are now trapped in the laundry because we can’t seem to get there to pick them up when it is open. We can’t find a good time for gelato either on this schedule, after lunch they are closed and after dinner it is too late and we are full.

We think our apartment is a pretty standard middle class Italian home. It is way different than anything I have ever lived in.  Besides it lacking some very key items, we also have to turn on the hot water heater with a switch and light the stove with a lighter. There are no closets, only a small armoir in each of the bedrooms.  The balcony off our living room is completely visible to neighbors, and people have conversations with their neighbors from balcony to balcony. Laundry is always hanging everywhere, here off the balconies and elsewhere in Sorrento. It is clearly a different kind of life style, but we are doing OK.

School Daze

Student Daze

Liz and I have just finished our first week of Italian lessons at Sorento Lingue in Sorrento.  The school is a 15 minute walk from our apartment, and we arrive by 9 everyday. We have 2 classes a day, and are in school until 12:30 or 1 pm. The first class is grammar and the second is Italian conversation. The school is very professional and the teachers are very good. But it is a huge struggle for me everyday. Things have really changed in the foreign language teaching arena since I last was a pretty lousy language student 35 years ago. I guess they have changed for the better, but I am completely unprepared for what goes on now. Instead of a lecture and maybe a weekly language lab, the entire class is interactive. Since this week only 3 of us are in beginning Italian, every 30 seconds or so I get called on. It is a constant barrage of questions, corrections, and more questions—all completely in Italian. Generally, not a word of English is spoken, except by me in complete frustration. There are frequent lapses into Spanish by all 3 of us students, and the teacher corrects them too. I often have no idea what the teacher is saying. Liz says you are supposed to guess, but I really struggle with that. I don’t know if I have learned much of anything this week, but maybe it will get better later.   Here is a picture of me on the first day of school:

Here is a picture of the school entrance. It is a serious place. I think it is rented from an order of nuns who occupy the second floor and often bless Liz and I in Italiano on arrival.

Herculaneum and Pompeii

We visited Herculaneum and then Pompeii both in one day. There was plenty of time for lunch and a visit to the local wine coop too. But when we got back to the hotel I got a massage.

Heraculaneum was better than Pompeii in many ways. It was better preserved because when Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. there were clouds of toxic gas interspersed with torrents of volcanic mud. The city was buried and preserved in a tufa-like rock which formed from the mud, and was only rediscovered in 1711. 

Heraculaneum was also a wealthier place than Pompeii, and the buildings are more grand and better decorated.  This is a picture of one of the mansions there. An amazing discovery made there were120 papyrus scrolls. We saw two of them in the Anthropology Museum in Napoi, and they look so charred it is incredible they can be read. Our guide at Heraculaneum just said “easy with a laser” when we asked. Heraculaneum is also much smaller than Pompeii, making it easy to see everything. Part of the reason it is smaller is because there is the modern and pretty crummy city of Ercolano on top of the unexcavated part.

Here  you can see the modern city on top of the excavated ancient city

This was a fast food place. The clay containers kept the food hot or cold, and people could grab something to go.

Capella Sansevero

I wish I could have taken pictures of some the sculptures in this fantastic funerary chapel for the Sansevero family in 1590. The ones I liked had names like “Sweetness of the Marital Yoke , “Modesty”, “Sincerity” , “Chastity”, and “Education”. There was no explanations or descriptions of the sculptures, so Liz and I had fun making up interpretations of the sculptures. There were also lots of opulent tombs, many paintings, and in the basement were some mysteriously embalmed bodies with their circulatory systems still totally intact. No one knows how they managed to do that. I did get one picture before they yelled at me to stop, and this was such a cool place that on the way out I bought the book!

Art in the Napoli Subway

For 1.90 Euro you can ride Napoli’s new and still-under-construction subway system for an hour and a half. That is plenty of time to visit the 6 major subway stops which have art on display. There are a few other stops with art, but they were on a different line and too far away for us—maybe next time.  It is a cool idea to have art in the subway, and gives some rising young artists an audience they may not otherwise reach. Here are some photos of works I really liked below. Luckily, I did not get yelled at for taking photos until the last stop.

            

Yes, this is a guy with a bird flying out of his mouth:

                     

Napoli Sulterranea

120 feet below street level in the old historic center of Napoli there is a complex system of 4^th century BC Greek tunnels, aqueducts, rooms and also the remains of a huge theater, which we visited. It was a great escape from the very hot afternoon sun. Much of the 300 mile system remains unexcavated because there are modern buildings above it.   

Above is a photo of  part of the tunnel system which was large and well lit. We also walked through a very narrow and low tunnel and had to use candles to see where we were going. Here is what it looked like ahead of me.

And finally, there was some pretty weird installation type art in the tunnel. It was not clear what it was there for, but I guess it was to make it more interesting.

Pizza Is What to Eat in Napoli

Napoli is famous for its pizza. Historians date a pizza-like food from the 1700’s.  Pizza Margherita, made with tomato, basil, and mozzarella, has the colors of the Italian flag. It was first baked in 1889 for Queen Margherita. A pizzaioli is a pizza maker, someone with highly specialized skills. Napoli style pizza is different than that from the north—it is hand made and has a cornicione or high crust that sticks up around the edge—sort of like a pie crust. Although that is the basic Neopolitan style, every pizza here is unique. That is why we have eaten it every day so far, and why we will go back for more. Our first afternoon in Napoli we had pizza margarita for lunch at La Scalupa, a trattoria in the marina across from our hotel. The crust was good and nicely burned from the wood fire, but it got soggy too fast. We forgot to take the picture, so here is the part we couldn’t finish.

The next day we had pizza at Locanda del Grifo, nearby the Hotel Neocropolis. Pizza Siciliana there had good grilled veggies on it and was better than La Scalupa, but that crust got soggy pretty fast too.

On the last Saturday in August almost everything authentic was closed in Napoli—only the tourist places were open. Starving and desperate, the only place we could find open actually called Pizza Margarita. It was part of a chain found in 6 or 8 Italian cities. This pizza lacked that wonderful burned crust, but it didn’t get soggy. So I guess I’d give it a B-. Oops, we forget to take that picture before we ate it too. Sorry for pix of the leftovers!

Stay tuned. We are going back to Naples for the San Genero holiday in a few weeks, and the pizza report is expected to improve. The best places there are closed for much of August. And now we have just arrived in Sorrento and there is pizza everywhere here too.  We had one for our first lunch here, but it was mediocre and salvaged only by the draft beer we drank with it.