What to do in Naples also Pompeii
There's a really great way to find out what to do in new places and that's called google it. You can generally figure out if a place is worth going to by looking at how many bloggers have made guides and lists of "top 5 things to do in XYZ land." Take Paris for example, bloggers are literally falling over themselves to write about the "top 10 restaurants" "top 5 off the beaten path things to see" "must see locations" "most instagramable locations in Paris" and my favorite "top free things to do in Paris"
Well we didn't do that in Naples and this is what we would've found if we had. Naples is a shit hole, pardon my Italian. First off there were like only 2 "things to do in Naples" things I found and both of them like 5/7 thing to do in Naples include Leaving. Naples.
I'm not making this up. It was like 1. eat the food, 2. go to the Amalfi Coast, 3. Go to Pompeii, 4. Go to Capri, 5. Check out this one cafe in Naples, 6. Leave Naples seriously it's not fun here. And to be fair and give credit where credit is due, Naples is the birth place of pizza but honestly that is about the only thing this city has going for it. And we have literally only eaten pizza since getting here minus one meal we had in Pompeii.
So anyway we don't like Naples and our initial issue I think was that we had booked ourselves into a really seedy looking hostel which we immediately cancelled our reservation at upon arrival and booked a super last minute Airbnb. The lady was able to meet us within 10 minutes and she was such a sweet lady so we were really lucky there. We have basically the exact same place as we had in rome (one room with a queen bed, small bathroom, mini kitchen all in a studio) except it's on the ground floor.
So per the recommendations we left Naples on our first day. We went to Pompeii which was really actually our original reason for going to Naples in the first place. Upon getting there we stopped for some food and it immediately started pouring rain. Amazing, I feel like I'm bringing the rain everywhere with me. Anyway it cleared up pretty quick and we entered Pompeii.
The thing about Pompeii is that it's actually a city. Like we all know that but when we say "go see Pompeii" you don't just like go see one rock or one dead person, you like actually have to walk around an entire city so we actually signed up for a several-hour adventure. The entire place is amazing though and from almost everywhere you can see Mt. Vesuvius in the distance which was made even more amazing by the fact that there was loud rumbling thunder throughout the day which gave you a bit more of the feeling of what it must have been like in Pompeii.
Additionally they keep the plaster castings of people somewhere out of the public eye, we were only able to see a few but even those few were really cool. It rained off and on the entire day that we were in Pompeii but since we're from Oregon we were fine. The city is so cool and so old and when you do some more learning about it's history and how it was discovered. The plaster castings that we have today were a stroke of genius during the original excavation of Pompeii. They found some bones at the bottom of a small hole and the head of the excavation halted all further digging and decided to fill the hole with plaster which is how we have those cool plaster castings.
Back in Naples we decided to spend our second day as a little rest day. It's about half way through this part of the trip and it's been nice to have a break. We are right next to a nice pizza place called Mazz. The two pizzas above are from there as well as that delicious chocolate pastry thing that they call a Baba. It's pretty amazing food here I'll give it that. We've so far eaten two entire pizzas each today so it's been good.
Tomorrow we take a fancy train up to Milan and I am looking forward to having a bit nicer surroundings :)