We left at the crack of dawn on our journey to Naples!! I was especially excited because this is the part of Italy that my grandparents are from and where a lot of my distant cousins still live! Upon arriving, my first impression was that Naples is a huge, sort of dirty city with a TON of people in it. A lot of these people drive vespas too, more than I’ve seen anywhere else! This trip was coordinated with school so many of the things we did involved museum type things. The first thing we did when we arrived in Naples was to go to this famous archeology museum that has lots of things from the ruins of Pompeii like statues, paintings and etc. It was interesting to see but I was personally thinking about Napolitano pizza the whole time. If you have ever seen the movie “Eat Pray Love”, the pizza Julia Roberts eats is from Naples at a place that really exists and she raves about how it is the best pizza she has ever had. Unfortunately, where we were wasn’t close to this famous pizzeria but we found another place that was really good and had outdoor seating. After lunch we went on a cannoli hunt and we found a great catch at a little pastry shop! After devouring our cannoli, we went back to the museum and got back on the bus. We thought we’d be staying in Naples longer but we were on a schedule that had us on track to go to Pompeii for the rest of the day. I knew we had almost arrived in Pompeii when I saw what looked like a huge volcano (AKA Mount Vesuvius!). I didn’t realize Pompeii was such a huge area of land, I mean I knew it was a city at one point but I didn’t know so many ruins still existed. We spent hours walking around the town seeing where they did different things during their day and various amphitheaters. It’s crazy because when the volcano erupted, the ash covered everything in such a way that it was preserved and almost everything is still in pretty good shape. Archeologists have poured some kind of plaster into the air pockets they discover and when it hardens they find the bones of people as they were when they died; you can even see the facial expressions! We saw an especially sad, and famous, one that is of a dog who is clearly trying to escape but was still chained up when the volcano erupted. Once we left Pompeii we went to our hotel and had dinner and after hanging out a bit, we went to sleep. All that walking around Pompeii tuckered us out!
The next day we drove even further south to Paestum, another site with ruins. The ruins left there are mostly of temples and after we walked around them we went into the museum and saw what they discovered in tombs. Most of the tombs have artwork so there were a lot of interesting things to see. In the city Paestum is in, bufula (buffalo for the Americans) mozzarella is really famous because there are a lot of buffalo farms around. Yes, that fresh mozzarella you eat that come in a ball is actually made from buffalo milk! I don’t know if that is common knowledge but I definitely didn’t know. At lunch I had a pizza with bufula mozzarella and bufula sausage (I’m not sure exactly what that means) but it was delicious! Plus we got gelato (a must after every meal) and they had Ferrero Rocher flavor, which is one of my favorite candies! On our way back out of the city we stopped at a bufula mozzarella shop and I got a huge delicious ball of it! I had it for lunch yesterday and it was fantastic. After a longggggg bus ride we were finally back in Orvieto and had to start thinking about tests and homework for the week. I can’t believe we only have 2 more weeks of class! Everyone said time would fly but it has gone at warp speed. Our next trip is on Wednesday for our last trip to Rome. Spoiler: We get to go inside the Colesseum!
No comments:
Post a Comment