Mangia Mangia! Bere Bere!

 Naples! 2023 Chapter Three

Italy has a number of names for places to eat, from local pizza joints, to casual dining to in-between dining to more formal restaurants. 

It’s fun to read the Wikipedia entries for the definition of Italian eateries:

Osteria is a casual place where locals used to gather to play cards and drink wine.  It evolved into a place with simple meals and usually no printed menu, serving whatever the cook had on hand that day.

Trattoria is also a casual dining affair with no printed menu where wine is sold by the decanter rather than the bottle.  Trattorias often serve food family style at common tables.

Ristorante is the most formal one, with a wine list, printed menu and upmarket food. Linens on the table, nicely dressed staff.

We had the opportunity to eat at some of the best of all of these.  And a very few that were far from the best.

Here are a few we loved so much we went back again.  And again:

Pruneto 1944  on the Via Posillipo ‒ we came upon this pleasant trattoria on one of our first forays to the west, away from downtown.  We were in search of a supermarket and passed Pruneto 1944 on the way.  On the way back, we stopped at one of their sidewalk tables for lunch.  Strictly an oral menu.  The pizza oven was not yet fired up because it was still too hot to use it during the day.

You have to know my husband to understand how thrilled he was when the waiter, reeling off what was on offer that day, heard ‘sea urchin spaghetti.’ I ordered the fish and tomato linguini.  Both were wonderful.  And the best bruschetta ever to start. Plus deep fried scampi coated in cornflakes on a skewer.  They even offered cold red wine. ( Sadly, looking them up on Trip Adviser, they are permanently closed)

A fenestella ‒ while on a crowded bus back up the hill after a day spent in town, Scott began a conversation with a very nice woman who suggested a restaurant right on the water’s edge in a small enclave called Marechiaro (clear water), just a couple of kilometres from where we live.  The restaurant is right on the sea and the entire length is windows looking across to Capri and to Vesuvius.

    It’s an elegant setting with a view of the Mediterranean, the islands and people bathing in the coves just below us.

Once again the food and wine were superb. I had a langoustine - Italy’s version of lobster. 

We were treated royally by a young and beautiful married couple who waited on us during our lunch. The couple were pleased to have a conversation with Scott in Italian. All four of us enjoyed our time there so much, the couple gave us gifts of an espresso cup and some limoncello shot glasses, made especially for the restaurant. 

Nonna Elena pizzeria Via Posillipo ‒ At first we were sceptical of this place on a nearby corner because it looked uninviting from the outside. We ended up going in because of a time constraint to find an exceptional pizza and yummy pasta. Great hosts once again. The interior was much more elegant than we expected.  And we returned several times after that. Sunday was very popular with the neighbourhood families after morning Mass.

Rosiello via Posillipo ‒ This is another fine example of a ristorante in our neighbourhood.  They offer terrace service overlooking a lush vineyard. The wine served here is made from that vineyard and is tasty indeed. What a beautiful way to spend an afternoon, overlooking the Bay of Naples and watching the sun set while enjoying the balmy evening air.  This restaurant, and many of the others we frequented were not cheap. But the food, especially the seafood, was worth it.

Ristorante Reginella Via Posillipo ‒ this cliff-hugging destination is halfway down the hill toward town, and clearly popular for showing off to your friends.  The food was really great and elegantly served. The outdoor terrace was alive with several large groups, one an extended family celebrating a baptism of a baby girl dressed up in piles of chiffon. The wait staff were accommodating (they seated us on a busy Sunday even though we hadn’t booked a table)  and efficient (when the rain started, they quickly moved an outdoor table in, under the roof for neighbouring diners).

Restaurants in town ‒ Some were better than pretty good.  Some were way over-rated, mostly by the ego of the manager or owner.

Attori e spettatori (Actors & spectators) 👎Via San Lucia ‒ This restaurant displays across the front of the building in confidently large letters, in English: ‘The Best Restaurant in Naples.’ 

It isn’t. We sat down for lunch and ordered an expensive first and second course. They brought us beautiful bruschetta  while we waited for our first course. A threesome arrived a few moments later. They were dressed in black leathers with major bling, all tatted up. The woman had what we call duck lips. (We learned in Rome that the Italians call those puffed up lips ‘chicken’s ass’).  The manager was either a friend or a fan of the three, and fawned all over them. In fact, the waiters delivered our first course to them by mistake, passing us by on their way to impress the other table. We ended up waiting another 1/2 hour for our first course. We were invisible. And will be from now on - not coming back. 

Ristorante Antichi Sapori 👍 right across Via Santa Lucia from the above ‒ Not as fancy schmancy, but the locals like to eat here and the service is much better. The food is solid trattoria and better than average pizza. We came back often.

Pizzeria Salvo 👎Riviera di Chiaia ‒ we tried this place because of its reputation for the best pizza in Naples. It wasn’t.  It’s a clear tourist trap and the wait staff is indifferent. 

50 Kalò 👍Piazza Sannazzaro ‒ Now this place does have one of the best pizzas in Naples. You can’t book a table and have to stand outside in a queue to get in.

It’s worth it. They have a great selection of beers and our veteran waiter enjoyed joking with us and talking to Scott in Italian. It’s one of only six pizzerias in Italy’s Michelin Guide. They are famous, and they deserve their reputation.  

Gino Sorbillo Lievito Madre al Mare 👍Via Partenope ‒ this is a giant open-air pizzeria situated along the waterfront. A great place to watch people and the food is pretty good too. Excellent service and the toilets are very clean!

Rosolino Ristorante  Via Nazario Sauro ‒ this small but elegant waterside eatery is just around the corner from Gino Sorbillo seafood. The pasta was good but the food in general was inconsistent. It was our first lunch in Naples. Scott wants me to mention that the staff are all beautiful women. 🥱

Bechamel 👍Via Enrico Pessina ‒ a very small but really decent food; it’s kitty corner from the Archaeological Museum of Naples and a good place to eat after visiting the Museum.

Now. There were two, most important haunts during our month in Naples: These were visited almost daily:  

The term bar in Italian is a bit of a misnomer.  It means a place where one usually stands with a coffee and pastry in the morning, and later in the afternoon, a glass of wine or beer. Some offer an aperitivo,  a small plate of antipasti or more often a bowl of potato chips. 

We discovered Bar Posillipo on our first full day in Naples, it being at the top of our long trek up the hill to Via Posillipo where we’d catch the bus each day. 

Bar Posillipo has a couple of outdoor tall tables under umbrellas to protect from the sun or the occasional rainfall.  We’d almost always stop here after a day down in the city.  

It is the perfect place to sit and watch the world go by.  Scooters, cars, buses, pedestrians.  Neighbouring vendors would come for espressos to go, or they’d stand at the bar inside for a quick espresso pick-me-up. The butcher, the green grocer ladies, the fish monger … we’d say hello to them all and we were their daily customers too.

The bar staff got to know us well and were truly impressed by Scott’s command of Italian.  They loved talking to him! 

I loved listening while I enjoyed my prosecco.

Once we took some friends there in the late morning. When they went inside to order,  they ordered me a cappuccino. The waiter very earnestly said, ‘She doesn’t drink anything but prosecco.’ 

We became friendly with the owner, our hostess, Annamaria. On our last day there, we promised we’d be back.  

One other bar we liked to frequent:  Bar Maschiera, an open-air affair with low stools and tables under umbrellas.  If it was raining, they weren’t open. This was a ten minute walk west along via Posillipo.  It sits at the top of a long pedestrian walkway down to the seaside ristorante: ’ A fenestella, mentioned above.         Bar Maschiera does not sell breakfast pastries but they do offer the odd cocktail, Aperol Spritz for example. Scott was in love with Antonella, one of the bar keeps. We made a point of stopping there every time we had a table at the restaurants in that neighbourhood. The owner of the place also enjoyed talking to Scott in Italian.  He even presented us with notebooks he had made up with his bar’ logo.  It came nicely packaged in a white jacket and with a red placeholder ribbon inside. (We thought it might have been a bible at first. !)

We really look forward to returning to all of these wonderful places this autumn!

Napoli! 2023 The Next Chapter

 Let Go and Let God Bus Driver 

    Riding the bus in Naples is an everyday occurrence for many Neapolitans.

    It certainly became one for us.

       Scott sussed out how to download the public transportation app where we could purchase a week-long ticket and activate it (which we had to do every day we took the bus.)

    We soon learned to let go and let god the bus driver. (apologies to AA).  The road down to town is part cobblestone, part tarmac, all with many holes and tight turns. Along steep cliff-sides and too-narrow passages.

    Riding the bus in and around Naples conjured up so many past traumas for me: vertiginous ascents and descents. Overtaking on a curve/hill. The terror invoked by the thought of plummeting to a rocky and/or water death.  No guard rails. Blowing a tire on a too-tight turn.
    All the above have happened to me.  The Beartooth Highway in Wyoming was one long vertiginous, switch-back ascent with steep cliffs on one side and only air on the other.  Thank god there were guardrails.  There weren’t any on the 4k road down to a small seaside village where we spent several days in Croatia. Add to that a one-way-only stretch where the ascender had to back up to let the descender pass. One wrong move and off the cliff you go.
    Overtaking on curves was a frequent occurrence in Slovakia.  Those incidents where death occurred were routinely covered in the national newspapers. While not ever seeing a mortal accident, we did see too many drivers passing on curves and hills.
    I actually did blow a tire on a mountain pass ascent in Slovakia because I took the switch-back curve too tightly (the tire survived until we got to our driveway 20 minute later).
    This is all to say that I again became a fatalist bus rider: those Neapolitan bus drivers (many of them very good-looking, both men and women) know what they are doing. No careening off cliffs or smashing into oncoming traffic.

Bus inspectors. For perhaps the first week of our daily ride into town, we saw no bus ticket inspectors.

    But for the next three weeks, an inspector would frequently step onto the bus and randomly check for validated tickets.

    We were always compliant.
    Not everyone was.  There was a smartly dressed young scofflaw* who not only did not have a validated ticket.  He had no ticket at all.  The inspector stopped the bus and proceeded to write up a long citation during which he cited which violations the guy had broken.  The busload of us people sat there for at least 20 minutes while the inspector made his point in front of us all.
    Finally, he escorted the perp off the bus and we continued on our journey down the hill.

    We saw that same perp once more on our daily bus ride.  We noticed he validated his ticket upon boarding the bus. 

    There was only one other time when an inspector called out a woman who didn’t have a ticket.  He just showed her off the bus.
    We were just a little smug about knowing to keep our tickets valid every time.

* Scott made me use that word

Napoli!

 

Vesuvius behind us

Napoli! An Introduction

My journal of our month-long stay in Campania was mislaid for seven months.  It has only just been unearthed. I’ve been reading through it and enjoy reliving our time there. And I’d like to share it with you.

We spent the month of October in one Italian city: Naples.  This gave Scott a chance to practise his Italian language skills, for which he is very proud (with good reason: he can chat with the taxi drivers!) 

We chose a Neopolitan Airbnb in a neighbourhood recommended by a friend who knows Naples well. We were not disappointed by the area and only slightly by the flat.

Our mild disappointment was that there was no view of the sea nor was there private outdoor space (we had a table and two chairs outside the front door along the pavement, both pedestrian and vehicular). 

It didn’t really matter in the end because the mosquitos came out at dusk and sitting in the nicely air conditioned living room was preferable.

Cool and comfortable flat

The flat was half-way down a descent toward the sea on a small side road off Via Posillipo, the main drag west out of downtown Naples. The walk up and down was quite the exercise. Five hundred fifty steps each way. We made that walk up at least once, often twice a day.  After a week or so we noticed our bodies improved from the exercise.

550 Steps up to Via Posillipo

It is easy to catch a bus right at the top of our street. The first full day, we sat at the little café at the top of our street to watch how often Bus No. 140 came and went.  As it was every 20 minutes or so, this became our go-to means into town. (That little café became our daily haunt throughout our time in Naples. More about it and the wonderful people there in a later post.)

Back to the bus: I spent almost ten years taking the bus to work in London, becoming fatalistic about missing the odd bus to and from the office during those years.  But Scott was often annoyed at my mantra about missing a bus:  “We didn’t miss our bus. That wasn’t our bus because we’re not on it.” 

A little more about where we lived:  Posillipo. It’s an upmarket neighbourhood to the west of Naples proper, but an easy 20 minute bus ride into the heart of the Lungomare (an area where Neapolitans stroll along the waterfront with views of Vesuvius to the east and Capri to the south.)

The immediate area at the top of our street houses pretty much anything you might want or need:  our little café (where they served a delicious prosecco), a green grocer with very good produce, a little deli where they make good sandwiches to order as well as dairy, wine and beer; a fish market, small butcher, pharmacy and a pizza joint that turned out to be pretty awesome. 

Fresh Veg and beautiful women!

(I’m saving the food and drink details for a later post) 

This, we believed, was going to be the start of a beautiful friendship. With Naples.

 Our Sicilian Celebration

England, particularly Shropshire, can be a little bleak in December.  Lots of rain, some flooding and no sun to speak of. That is why a trip to Sicily for Scott’s post-Christmas birthday was a high point in our year.

A couple of things we wanted to experience on this, Scott’s second trip to the island and my first:

For Christmas, I gave Scott a handmade ‘watch box’ from Stinga, the company based in Sorrento, which has been making exquisite inlaid woodwork marquetry boxes for the past three generations.  My mother brought back a music box from Stinga for me in the early ‘60s from her trip with her father to Italy.

Scott and I tried unsuccessfully to visit the shop whilst in Sorrento for the scant 50 minutes we were allowed on the bus tour. (Never ever take a bus tour to the Amalfi Coast.  It’s insulting to the tourists and insulting to the residents.) So I bought the box online.

Scott has been collecting antique watches ever since he began visiting Italy, Turin in particular. He has found an excellent little shop specialising in small bijou antiques: watches, rings, silverware.

When the Stinga watch box arrived, I decided to include in the box a number of addresses in Palermo that sell antique watches.

That was the first experience we didn’t.

Let me explain: our early morning flight to the island was cancelled. We had left our hotel nose-bleedingly early in order to make the flight (out of London City Airport) and found that the new flight was not for another four-plus hours. We finagled our way out of security to catch a taxi back to our hotel to wait in relative comfort rather than in the airport. After returning, the second flight was late, and we ended up arriving in Palermo well into  the evening, six hours after our expected arrival. Our car and driver were there to meet us and whisk us off to …

One of the most beautiful, elegant, exquisite villas we have ever experienced: the Villa Igiea, on the Palermo Coast of Sicily. It’s a Rocco Forte hotel so that gives one a clue about the level of luxury and commensurate price.

Having been up for 16-plus hours on two plane journeys, we were greeted by truly beautiful people who made us feel as though we had just come home.

Indeed, after the nasty weather in Shropshire and in London, the balmy evening on the coast enticed us to linger on the terrace at the hotel’s Terrazzo Bar, under the stars and under a welcome space heater. 

After a good night’s sleep, we wandered down to breakfast, overlooking the sea, for a pleasant meal. Yes, it was a buffet, and with cooked specials as one wanted.  But it included an amazing array of fresh fruit: raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, red currants, cantaloup. I was glad to see they offered mimosas. Of course I took advantage.

Later, we walked through the extensive gardens, deciding, finally, not to go into town to look for watches, but just relax and enjoy this haven from the real world. 

Yes. We ate, drank and slept in this oasis the two days we were in Palermo. It was just what we had dreamed of.

Now. Onto the west of Sicily. 

We booked two nights in a town called Castellammare del Golfo, again on the north coast. I have a very good friend (I’d say old friend but he’s not old, just our friendship is old) whose family is from this town. He is a first-generation American, his parents both immigrants from Sicily.  Greg turned me onto Castellammare and told me he has more family here than in the U.S.

To get there, Scott was happy for me to book a rental car - he drives, I no longer do. 

Our taxi driver from the Villa to the airport (where we expected to pick up our car) was a great tour guide on all that we passed on the way to the airport:  a couple of guys were extracting sea urchin gonads and selling them by the road for Euros 25 a cup - four pasta meals’ worth. 

That’s like buying a bottle (or three) of Barolo whilst in La Morra - can’t get it in the UK for less than 60 quid a bottle, even if you can find it!

So, past the road-side sea urchin merchants, my first mistake was to book a car rental through booking.com.  Unh-uh.  They’ll give you a good rate, but you’ll have to be picked up in a van and driven miles from the airport to some back-water location with an unknown car rental. So no. Go for Avis for god's sake. They’re in the airport!

After the car rental refused to alter the contract (they had me as driver), we escaped with an Uber guy who took us all the way to Castellammare for a mere 60 Euros. It’s only about 45 kilometres from Palermo anyway.

I backtrack a little: when I happened to be speaking with the Concierge at the Villa Igiea, he wanted to know:  “Why are you going to Castellammare?” in a manner that made me question why indeed?  Well, because my friend’s family comes from there!

In the back of my mind - really, for all of us who watched the Godfather and wondered about where is really safe in Sicily (yes, typical American fantasists) - in the back of my mind, are we really safe gallivanting around the hinterlands of Sicily??

Well, yes of course. Duh.

Greg didn’t actually tell me to stay in the town of his parents’ families, but I was intrigued, so I booked a hotel on the coast again: the Marina di Petrolo Hotel and Spa.  

The hotel suffered in our minds, only because we’d just left the most idyllic spot in all the world, the Villa Igiea.  

Coming down from heaven, the hotel was actually just fine. We had a small balcony view of the coast and the sun shone on us the entire time.

We could walk everywhere, enjoy the historic town centre, the sea. We could sit and watch the people. We could watch the cats!  It was a holiday weekend so many of the restaurants were closed, go figure.

This was New Year’s Eve. 

We were fortunate to find a restaurant that still had a table free for the evening so we booked it. This was Sunday and the church bells rang in that very European style - loud, atonal, clanging and joyous.  Not at all like the precise change ringing bells we have here in Shropshire every Sunday morning. We caught the last few minutes of mass in the large, old cathedral (Scott likes to listen to the Italian for his studies) then meandered around the old Norman/Arab - influenced fortress castle guarding the harbour.  Then a nice lunch on the waterside before climbing back up to the historic town centre.

When the sun goes down, families come out for their nightly passeggiata, strolling along the pedestrian areas with grandparents and children in tow. 

It’s a wonderful sight.

Our restaurant, Egesta Mare, presented a feast consisting entirely of fresh seafood.  It was amazing. We dined with many of the multi-generational families we saw along the avenues.

Happy New Year!

And we found a very nice, local car rental guy who rented us a hybrid which Scott drove from Castellammare to the west coast and Trapani, another harbour town with some semi-famous salt flats.  

We detoured from town to first see whether we could glimpse the elusive flamingo.  This is the second experience we wanted to have whilst in Sicily.  And we found them! We couldn’t get close enough for photography without a super zoom lens, but we saw them just the same.  They are really amazing to watch.

Our hotel in Trapani, the Palazzo Gatto Art Hotel & Spa,  was just a few steps away from the pedestrian part of town.  Not exactly a palazzo, and we saw more cats in Castellammare, but the hotel was pleasant enough.

After joining the families of Trapani in their evening passeggiata, we stopped for pizza before heading back to the hotel and bed.

On the morning of the second of January, Scott drove us back to Castellammare to drop off the rental car. The nice guy agreed to drive us all the way back to Palermo. He was good practice for Scott's Italian, and he was a real fan of American wrestling. !

Arriving back in Palermo for our last day, we found ourselves once again in Eden (the Villa Igiea) for one more luxurious evening.

We returned home to rain, flooding, and a sunless January in Ludlow. Oh well.  After a week of beautiful sunshine and the mountainous terrain on the north coast of Sicily, we were ready for the change.

We enjoyed our time in Sicily enough that we want to return.  We’re thinking about this late spring for a couple of weeks back in Naples (that’s another adventure! I’ll share later) before taking the ferry down to Sicily for another week or so.

We’re enjoying it while we can!