CharlotteCooper.net - Travel

Kay took me to Naples for a week. Yeah, we ate a lot of pizza, and this is what else we found out:

The rabbit
Every guidebook warned us about arriving in Naples at Piazza Garibaldi so that by the time we did arrive I was so convinced I was going to be robbed that I shot out of that place and didn't stop until I had marched a mile or so down the road to our hotel. What freaked me out even more was when Kay said: "Look, it's a rabbit." Alone in a crowd of people sat a small white rabbit tied to an old pizza box with a few wilted leaves stuck around it. What the fuck was that about? It had to be a scam. We were obviously in danger. Don't even look at it! Sweat poured off me as we flew down the road as fast as we could go.

Ceilings
To see the sky from our hotel room you have to open the curtain, open the first set of shutters, open the window, pull back the makeshift drape, pull open the second set of shutters and then crane your neck out as far as it will go. If you reach far enough you'll be able to see a tiny patch of blue sky high up above the narrow alleyway. Maybe it's to make up for the lack of daylight but the ceiling of our cheap hotel room was encrusted with plasterwork depicting bountiful fruit, delicate deer and the full company of Muses, each showing a single breast.

Bar Millennium
We got breakfast tickets redeemable at the Bar Millennium next door. In other circumstances we would have been too pathetic to go into a place like this. I don't even like coffee. But we tried to be brave and do what the local people do, and by the end of the week we'd have a hot chocolate and a café lunghi waiting for us by the time we'd picked out a pastry for breakfast, the coffee man let me sit on the special seat and shook our hands when we left, and we'd learnt to say "Ciao" without feeling too stupid.

Politeness counts for nothing
Thankfully we are rude women and so learning the me first me first way of life wasn't difficult for us. Pushing and shoving is expected at every opportunity, and people will think you are plainly stupid if you stand back and wait, or let others go first. If someone is talking to someone, butt in and take over the conversation. Talk loudly and gesticulate expansively. Don't expect traffic to stop for you, even at a red light. Stride out purposefully into the road and hope for the best.

Italians do good cakes
We ate cakes of every shape, size and description. My favourite was the local sfogliatelle, sweet triangular puff pastry things filled with thick custardy stuff and candied peel. Sounds weird, tastes like heaven. I also rate the sweet buns we ate for breakfast every day, and the full-on rum baba type cake covered in syrup, cream and wild strawberries. Yeah man, wild strawberries! Yowza.

Pasty white girls buy fake Prada
The young black guys set out their fake designer handbags on the pavement every day and then pack them into outsized holdalls in the evening and haul them away on the bus. There are hundreds of men trying to sell stuff, it's desperate. But you know, we're dying to have a little knockoff souvenir of our holiday so we go up to one guy and ask him how much he wants for a small fake Prada. He keys 25 euros into his mobile phone. No way! Kay knocks him down to 15, then 10, then 8. Each time we walk away he rushes up to us with a lower price. I get a bag too. We still pay over the odds, our bags are only plastic with a cheap papery lining, but fuck it man, we can afford it.

Volcanoes
Ever since I was a kid I've wanted to see a real volcano. Vesuvius is stately, massive and elegant but it's the Solfatara at Pozzuoli that I love the best. This is an area that's like the Neapolitan version of Harrow, very suburban. You go through some woods and then - voila - you're standing on the crater of this extinct volcano that still spurts out gases and stuff. It's a bit heavy on the sulphur, but there's boiling mud, there lots of smelly steam rising from the ground, and the whole place looks like a moonscape. Those crazy Italians also built mini saunas over a couple of the vents so that you can go and stand in the steam. P.U.

Pompeii
Wow. I mean...W O W!

Rome is only a two hour train ride away
The journey takes you past buffalo farms, via rocky mountain passes, citrus groves, and through mile upon mile of generic-looking houses. Then you get there and you can't understand why you wanted to come to this place after all. The streets heave with creepy-looking nuns and idiotic groups of tourists, everything of value or note is thoroughly exploited and mediated for you. The Vatican exudes evil in a way that'll make your head spin, and you know that the Pope is not far away, and that you could be breathing a particle of air that has been inside his lungs.

I know what seasickness feels like
The Bay of Naples looks so calm from a distance but just get in a boat to visit one of the islands and you'll be heaving after 20 minutes. A never-ending cookery programme being shown on the telly in the cabin didn't help either. The payoff was a sunny deserted off-season Capri at the other end of the journey. It must be unimaginably vile in high season, but romantic and exciting when everyone's gone home. We saw a restaurant with crumbling publicity photos pasted up in the windows of a youthful Shelly Winters, Jackie and Ari O, George Hamilton and - yay - Jim Kerr and Patsy Kensit tucking into something tasty.