Amalfi Coast, Aug 2022 - Day 1

For my 30th birthday last year, my sister and a few other members of my family paid for me to join her in Italy for a few days during her summer Interrail trip. I would fly to Naples where she would meet me, we would spend the rest of that day and the night there, and go down to Positano on the Amalfi Coast the following day. 

Some of this was written as notes during the trip, some of it many months later using photos to jog my memory. The notes written during the trip are in italics.

Saturday 6th

After a 5am breakfast at the hotel in Stansted and an 8am flight, I meet my sister outside Napoli Centrale train station and we get a taxi to our apartment.

I've been to Naples before, again just for a day, and I didn't leave the hostel. It felt like somewhere I didn't want to walk around at night. 

The taxi dropped us off on a fairly busy street, and the directions took us down another side street, this one too narrow to admit cars and much quieter. Not in a good way. We eventually found the address and stood outside thinking Nope. Our Airbnb was a squat concrete shed-like structure on the ground floor of a residential building. Looked like it once had a utilitarian use like housing a generator or something, though it had been nicely renovated outside. It was quite nice inside too, small but clean and bright, and had the essentials including a little kitchen, it was absolutely fine for sleeping in on a short trip. Except for the location. Even though we knew the locks worked and I felt mean for feeling like it was a dodgy area and not entirely trusting the local residents, it felt exposed and we weren't comfortable. So we left.

My sister booked a hotel a 15-minute walk away... which turns out to be next to the train station, where we'd originally come from. Thankfully it is indeed much nicer, a proper hotel, and there's even a balcony with sun loungers, an outdoor shower, and a cool view of the city with a tantalising glimpse of Vesuvio just visible around the corner. And there's a restaurant and pizzeria immediately opposite, so we won't need to go wandering around to find food. I had thought we could visit the catacombs after lunch, to get out the heat for a couple of hours, but we were quite content to stay at the hotel! Also - so many swifts!

We went over to the restaurant - Gautani Adamo - for a late lunch, and ended up having a Caprese salad each and sharing some bruschetta and some fettuccine alla bolognese. They do pizza too so we might go back and get one to share for dinner later.

10:45pm: Dinner was an experience! We decided to go to what is perhaps Napoli's most famous pizzeria - L'Antica Pizzeria da Michele - as it was just a 10-minute walk away. Naples is generally regarded as the home of pizza. There was a huge crowd of people outside and a long line stretching back up the street. We thought getting a takeaway pizza would be faster so joined the line, about 4 car lengths away from the door (there were cars parked there), at 7:50pm, expecting a half-hour wait to order.

We finally walk away with our pizza two hours and ten minutes later! We finally ordered after an hour and a half, then waited another 40 minutes for the pizza. When one customer got theirs just a few minutes after ordering, my sister noticed their system through the open door, they just grab any of the order receipts instead of in the order they were made. 

So was it worth it? Well the pizza was really good but nothing surprising or particularly 'wow'-inducing, but it was worth it just for the experience, it's funny, and I can now tick 'eat pizza in Naples' off the travel list. We wouldn't have done anything else this evening either, just stayed in the hotel room. 

Oh and apparently it's common knowledge in the city that gangs let off fireworks to signal a drug shipment has arrived. That explains the ones this afternoon during daylight. Hahaha.