“oh. Yes, it appears that the world’s best pizza place was 30 seconds away from us”
Naples-Sabaudia
After being more than a little scared from the night before, all I wanted to do was tick off some underground passageway stuff, eat a pizza, and get quickly out of Naples. But, in the daylight, it actually looked a lot nicer, and seemed a lot less scary than last night had led us to believe.
We got ourselves on the 10am subterranean tour, and within a few minutes I was like an animated child again (see the write-up from the Polish salt mine day). In typical Italian style, it appears that houses were just built on top of other houses over the last few hundred years, as you weren’t allowed to build outside the city walls. As such, there was apparently a Roman 10,000 seater theatre that had literally just been added to over the years by houses, apartments, offices, and shops. The first place we were shown, was an old granny’s 1 room apartment, that she only left 10 years ago, and which again, when you pushed the bed away had some stairs leading down to a cellar which was once the stage of the theatre (and which, like any good Italian, she had used to store black market goods during the war!)
The next stop was an old carpenters shop, which was only discovered a year ago (how?), but which included part of one of the grand arches of the theatre. I genuinely have no idea how somehow the Italians had ‘missed’ this theatre that had been built around or over, for the last few hundred years? The main underground show, was the tunnels under the city. As expected they were huge, and whilst originally used to carry water around the city, it was then used as a rubbish dump, and then bomb shelters for the war (which, the Italians did not have time to clear out all the rubbish, so just concreted over. There was 5 metres of rubbish they concreted over – that’s a lot of rubbish).
By about 2pm, we were all done (although due to some bad calculations, and being a little sick to the back teeth, we missed apparently the best pizza place in the world. Even in Eat, Pray, Love and everything – not that I have read or seen the film. OK, maybe a little…). Back on the train, and back to Paul’s more another night of fine wine and fine dining. An early start tomorrow and a long drive, so clearly we had the latest night we’d had for a long time. Good planning EurHair…
Day 34
