Day 20: Napoli, You Hectic And Wonderful Bastard
We arrived in Napoli after a pretty easy and pleasant train ride from Rome. After taking the wrong exit out of the train station we found ourselves lost in a hectic car park for a good 20 minutes trying, and failing, to find a taxi. Fortunately with a bit of Google mapping, we found the actual front of the train station where there were literally hundreds of cabs.
We had a friendly enough taxi driver who agreed to take us to our hotel for €10 (the hotel helpfully told us how much we should pay) although considering how crazy everyone drives here, we probably could have paid him a bit more in danger money.
After checking into our simple B&B on the fifth floor of an old building (they're all old!), we hit the streets to explore a bit and to get our first hit of Napoli pizza.
First impressions of Napoli? It's hectic. Cars and scooters everywhere, graffiti on most walls and garbage on the streets. Oh, and reeeeallly narrow streets. Our taxi driver had to do a three point turn just to get into some streets.
Second impressions of Napoli? I love its craziness. It doesn't have the tourism of Rome, which means visiting tourist spots isn't the worst experience in the world and you can actually see what you came to see without battling hoards of people. It's also really cheap here. One of the best pizzas in the world will set you back about €3,50, you can get Aperol Spritz for €1 in some places and groceries are cheap too. We may actually stick to our daily budget for once!
Tour Of Pizza
Our plan is to eat only eat pizza for lunch and dinner during our time in Napoli. Because Adam and I love Napoli pizza and it seems only fitting to try as many as humanly possible in 48 hours.
May god have mercy on our hips and thighs.
Our final morning in Rome. We went to the popular Roscioli to get some deli snacks and eat them in a nearby park.
These are some pricey legs of prosciutto. We may have treated ourselves to the €150 a kg one, which was the most expensive prosciutto I've ever had.
Cheese and various snacks.
A little bit of mortadella, prosciutto and provolone for brunch.
We made it to the train! It was super comfy and it made me wish we were catching more trains in Italy.
We tried to get a photo of the train but, as you can see, there were wayyy too many people. Sigh.
A little snapshot of daily life near where we're staying. It's busy, messy and people are always yelling at each other (I think in a good way?) and I love it.
This was not staged at all. *cough*
We strategically visited L'Antica Pizzeria da Michele at about 4.30pm to avoid waiting too long. In the end it was a smart move as we only had to wait about 10 minutes. This place has been around for over 100 years and was made super famous by Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love – a movie I haven't actually seen.
Pretty much everyone goes here and it's particularly popular with Japanese tourists. So much so that their website is in Italian, English and Japanese.
Stay hydrated, stay alive.
They only serve two pizzas here – marinara and margherita. I like the simplicity, even though to waiter amusingly forgot our order (what's to forget? There are only two things on the menu).
Adam is in flavour country.
I look quite pleased about the whole thing.
Da boys are makin' da pizza.
Caught taking a pic. At least he smiled for the photo?
So we walked past this on the way home. I'm thinking it's for some kind of photoshoot?
And while everyone was looking at the above, this glorious thing appeared from the traffic. An akita on a scooter!!! He looked so chill about the whole thing.
A little butcher near us.
From our B&B we can see (and hear) this bell tower which was actually going off when I took this photo.
Kind of scary when you look down.
Rooftop views.
There's always something happening on these streets.
After relaxing and digesting in our hotel room for a bunch of hours, we decided to try our luck at Sorbillo. Both our cab driver and hotel owner recommended it, and after we saw a hugely long line at 7pm (it opens at 7.30pm) of hungry diners, we decided we really had to check it out. We strategically waited till 10.30pm, but it was still crazy busy even on a Monday night. After 30 minutes of waiting, we got in!
This was a speck and mushroom pizza. It was nice to try a white pizza here. As expected, it was soft and chewy. What was not expected was the size of these pizzas – they are massive!
The margherita extra (the extra is for more cheese). It was so good! We probably didn't need the extra cheese, but hey, we'll walk it off, right?
Just Adam smiling at his pizza.
This place recently won "Best Neapolitan pizza in the world" which is probably why the crowds are massive.
