Spoiler alert: Napoli is the best! The people, the food, the city. I should have come here much earlier.
But let me wind back a bit to the start of the day. As we knew the Herculaneum acheological site is closed on Wednesdays, we decided to visit Napoli on that day. When preparing for this trip, I browsed and compared all sorts of activities available here. But as this was our first time in Napoli, I looked for a way to give us an overview of the city instead of specific ones such as the catacombs or the churches. And the website of Napoli in Vespa caught my eye.
So we arranged for the morning tour (that’s 9:00 to 13:30) to get more of the history of the city and its inhabitants. We discovered so much about the historical facts and anecdotes, the culture and every day’s life of the Napolitans, thanks to the crash course that Danilo gave us during the walks in the neighbourhoods of Napoli, and the expert driving with his teammate Luigi allowed us to cover a big part of the important areas. And riding the Vespa’s here is also a way to better connect with the lifestyle.
I loved Napoli from the start, and it has certainly something to do with the fact that I can recognise so much from its greek roots; always obvious after the fact, but the original settlers built Pale Poli (Old Town) first, and then moved to a nearby place and started with Nea Poli (New Town), which eventually became Napoli.
After the tour, we wanted to enjoy another famous pizzeria and went to Sorbillo.
We wandered again in the Spanish quarter of Napoli. We spotted a crowd towards the upper part and went there as we got curious and found a shrine to another divinity here: Maradona.
We got to our next stop in our trip in Portici and settled in. The house we stay in looks like a museum! The room takes us back to the early 19th century (apart from a small TV set). It would be quite easy to film some movies in here without changing many things.
In the evening, we got to a completely different style. The Gattò Bistro has an unusual concept and combines three carasteristics:
- It’s a cat bar (like you could find in Japan)
- Also it specialises in vegeterian and vegan food (for hippies and lunatics)
- And last but not least, it promotes all sorts of craft beers (for serious people who know what’s important)
And the clientele is a motley crew as you could imagine to fit that list.