Pizza, Lava, and Eroticism

These are a few of my favorite things! All can obviously be found in Italy.

Italy has so much to offer that traveling during this module only includes different cities in Italy. It's THAT good.

So we hopped on TrenItalia (marketing plug) last Friday and headed to Naples. No sleeping necessary (aside from my hangover) for three hours on a sunlit train. Very pleasant. We had basically one intention there and that was to have the Mother of all Pizzas. Ever.

Unlike one of my travel companion's very ill thought out plan to eat 5 salami sandwiches on the train before we got there, I prepared myself in every way possible to taste what pizza was meant to taste like.

We arrived in front of the famed L'antica Pizzeria da Michele where Julia Roberts ate what was probably the first carb of her life while starring in Eat, Pray, Love before the crowd even started to congregate. Somehow they did manage to fit our own personal crowd of 16.

There are three sizes of pizza: Normal, Medium, and Maxi.

First bite of Heaven.

Go big or go home, right? Needless to say… I got the maxi. When in Rome, or Naples.

It was absolutely delicious and though it was hard to stuff it all in my stomach, I did it. I don’t regret a single bite.

Outside of the doors, slicing through the crowd of people, lay before us the beautiful and romantic Naples. Less historic, making it much more lively, we took in every little piece of architecture and culture of this pizza-inventing, original-colonized city. From the tall project buildings to the spiderweb-esque bullet punctures on the windows, it was hard not to fall in love.

Everything I dreamed of... (?)

…the pizza was worth it.

Thank goodness it was never our intention to spend the night there or I may not have been writing this post.

The trains in Naples and surrounding areas work a little differently than all other trains I have ever taken. Depending on where you begin and where you intend on ending determines the amount you pay for your train ticket. I guess it’s intercity rather than interborough, so it makes sense.

We conveniently were able to get to Sorrento for 4 euro and the longest trainride since Venice. About an hour of people-watching and hoping the scenery would get better than our first image of the Almafi Coast.

Sorrento on a cloudy day is still beautiful.

And by scenery I meant the natural layout of the city, not the boys who blatantly wore girls pants and had 80s style, side shaven-frontal floppy hairstyles. I found it very strange that it was literally a very unique style that seemed to en vogue for the Napolitano boys, and no other boys in all of Italy.

When I finished dissecting the mops on the heads of these boys I got to look out the window and discover the landscape had turned from overly-urbanized Naples to hilly Sorrento with steep peaks over calm waters. It was absolutely beautiful.

The city (town?) itself was adorable. It looked as if it was built by Walt Disney; cutely narrow streets, shops galore, and just an all around peacefully fattening feel.

Not to mention Sorrento is famed for being the inventors of the strong, fruity, Italian liquor Limoncello. Perhaps the whole reason for the city being so lush and beautiful was to keep their lemon growth at its peak. Head sized lemons are not something one can simply grow in infertile and polluted soil.

View from Vesuvius.

We went from life and growth in one town to death and destruction in the next. You guessed it: Pompeii. What’s a little Italian historical excursion without some sort of dead civilization? Before we could see the dead itself, we saw the monster responsible.

And what a monster it was! After taking a trolley up the winding Vesuvian streets, which my theatrical friend described very cleverly yet falsely as a homage to the mythological serpent of Pompeii, we got to the top. And by top I mean, the highest point they would take us before we had to walk.

You don’t know how out of shape you are until you attempt to climb a Volcano. All the while, there was a tiny part of me just begging for it to erupt to put me out of my misery.

By the time I reached the top, I had whined to so many people that I made new friends and I had felt every single bite of pizza I had taken within the last 4 weeks.

So worth it though; even atop a Volcano, you couldn’t help but appreciate the beauty of everything we overlooked.

Pompeii with the quiet monster behind her.

Even the dead civilization.

This civilization, Pompeii of course, is always publicized as the poor innocent city that naively situated themselves at the foot of a Volcano and fell victim to its fury.

Well, I have my own theory. What isn’t publicized much until you get there is the fact that they were crazy nymphomaniacs. All over the walls are elaborately painted frescos of the Italian version of the Kama Sutra.

In my theory, possibly shared with the radical Catholics of the world, that they were probably soiled with unexpected pregnancies and STDs so God was just like, ya know what guys, enough.

enter Mt. Vesuvius

Perhaps this was me in my last life.

The main topic of conversation was: What the hell would you do if you saw that mountain explode in Volcanic ash and molten rock? After weighing the possibilities of attempting to create an imaginary sled, maxing out a lifetime of adrenaline sprinting away, and hiding as deep underground as one could possibly dig before it hit, we all decided we would just lay down and let it happen.

And now we have an excavated city of ruins and frescos and pottery and clay people in positions of terror. And eroticism.

A trip that covered at least three of the deadly sins: lust, gluttony, and vanity.