Napoli field trip

Sorrento Day 4 Fri 4/9/10
This day bright & early we shuttled to town to catch the Circumvesuviana to Naples to visit the National Archeological Museum where I’d read that many of the prized frescoes & artifacts from Herculaneum & Pompeii are stored. We bought tickets & tried to get through the turnstile at the station only to have our tickets spit back out at us. Steve went back to the window where the guy told him the tickets wouldn’t work until 9:30am. Ok, that was just a few minutes away but in the meantime we watched many nationalities of tourists confused about the same situation. We imparted our 9:30am wisdom to our fellow travelers & all of us just got out of the way of the natives while looking like dumb tourists, which we were. 9:30am came & the floodgates opened for all of us neophytes. Along the journey we connected with 2 college students heading to Pompeii. We urged them to go to Herculaneum in addition to Pompeii. It was a pleasant chat all the way to their stop asking all the usual fellow English-speaking traveler Q’s..Where are you from? What are you doing here? How long are you here? What have you seen…blah,blah,blah? It was fun. They were roomies in London…one from Minnesota & the other from Toronto doing the semester abroad thing.

I had read a TripAdvisor review of the museum, which said that it’s only a 10 minute walk from the station to the museum. No prob I said! Steve had been forewarned that it’s a dangerous place, that Napoli station, & one shouldn’t linger long near there. So he checked his trusty iPhone for our coordinates & found out we needed to take the metro to the Cavour station in order for it to be a 10 minute walk to the museum. Ok, when in Italy you cannot get metro tickets in the train/metro station. You have to find a Tabacchi recognized by a big blue sign with a white T on it to buy your dang ticket. Done. We were on our way! Reminder: we’d taken the 9am shuttle from our hotel to get to town/the Sorrento Circumvesuviana station to catch the 9:37am train to Naples…by the time we got off the metro at the museum stop it was 12:15pm. Man, that’s A LOT of overhead! We were thinking this place better be spectacular! And, it was, in a way. Read on.

There were splendid displays of frescoes, art, sculptures, household items (some melted glass vessels, pans for cooking 24 eggs at a time, lots of stuff you see now from Calphalon & their competitors), surgical & dental instruments that eerily resemble today’s instruments, a cool model of Pompeii made of cork (in the 1920’s maybe? I may need to check my facts on this), charred remains of foodstuffs, explanation of where pine nuts come from, add’l sculptures unrelated to Pompeii & Herculaneum but equally awesome. (Hercules…mmmmmm) Unfortunately, the Etruscan exhibit was closed due to some needed restoration or something. Tom told me that exhibit is a ‘must-see’. Sucks to be me.

We trained back & on our way through the streets of Sorrento who did we see? Those college girl travelers we encountered on the way north to Napoli. They had seen Pompeii & were as wowed as we were. Small world, eh? Anyhow, I had in my mind that I needed some cookies in order to make it through the night, as the hotel was barren. I’d seen a market somewhere along our various walks through Sorrento & magically found it again. We bought bread, cheese, cookies, bananas & a boatload of chocolate bars to bring back to our fam & friends. We dipped in to a café & bought some calzones for dinner on the balcony. Mine was rappini & cheese. Steve’s was prosciutto & cheese. His def won that contest. It was ok…I had cookies! We had some time to kill before the shuttle pickup so we took a walk to Marina Piccola which is actually the big marina where all the ferries to & from Capri & Naples, etc. come & go. Marina Grande is teeny tiny & is used by fishing boats. I need to figure out how to post more pix on here. We shuttled back up to the hotel & ate our calzones on the balcony as the sun went down. I took a gazillion pix, one of which might be to the left. We caught up on emails & crashed. A lovely day.