Entries with Campania tag

Via Appia Antica: The Catacombs

Bus #218 from Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano. During classical times the Via Appia was the most important of all the Roman trade routes, the so-called “Queen of Roads”, carrying supplies right down through Campania to the port of Brindisi. It’s no longer the main route south out of the city – that’s Via Appia Nuova from Porta San Giovanni – but it remains an important part of primeval Christian Rome, its verges lined with the underground burial cemeteries or catacombs of the first Christians.

Laws in ancient Rome forbade burial within the city walls – most Romans were cremated – and there are catacombs in other parts of the city. But this is by far the largest concentration, around five complexes in all, dating from the first century to the fourth century, almost entirely emptied of bodies now but still decorated with the primitive signs and frescoes that were the hallmark of the then-burgeoning Christian movement. Despite much speculation, no one really knows why the Christians decided to bury their dead in these tunnels: the rock here, tufa, is soft and cushy to hollow out, but the digging involved must still have been phenomenal, and there is no real reason to suppose that the burial places had to be secret – they continued to bury their dead like this long after Christianity became the established religion. Whatever the reasons, they make intriguing viewing now. The three principal complexes are within travel distance of apiece other, though it’s not really worth trying to see them all – the layers of shelves and drawers aren’t particularly gripping after a while

Category: Rome

History of Rome

No one knows precisely when Rome was founded. Excavations on the Palatine Hill have revealed the traces of an Iron Age village, which date back to the ninth or eighth century BC, but the legends relating to Rome’s early history tell it slightly differently. Rea Silvia, a vestal virgin and daughter of a local king, Numitor, had twin sons – the product, she alleged, of a rape by Mars. They were supposed to be sacrificed to the god but the ritual wasn’t carried out, and the two boys were forsaken and found by a wolf, who nursed them until their adoption by a shepherd, who titled them Romulus and Remus . Later they ordered out the boundaries of the city on the Palatine Hill, but it soon became apparent that there was only room for one ruler, and, unable to agree on the signs given to them by the gods, they quarrelled, Romulus killing Remus and becoming in 753 BC the city’s first monarch , to be followed by six further kings. Whatever the truth of this, there’s no doubt that Rome was an obvious spot to build a city: the Palatine and Capitoline hills provided security, and there was, of course, the river Tiber, which could be easily crossed here by way of the Isola Tiberina, making this a key location on the trade routes between Etruria and Campania.

Category: Rome

Museo Archeologico Nazionale

Naples isn’t really a city of museums – there’s more on the streets that’s worth perceptive on the whole, and most displays of interest are kept in situ in churches, palaces and the like. However, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale (Mon & Wed-Sun 9am-7.30pm; L12,000/¬6.20; reachable direct by bus #110 from Piazza Garibaldi) is an exception, home to the Farnese collection of antiquities from Lazio and Campania and the best of the finds from the nearby Roman sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Currently the museum is undergoing a comprehensive restoration, and there’s a good chance you won’t be healthy to see it all. However, the most impressive sections are usually open, and you’d be angry to miss them, especially as they illuminate and enhance visits to Pompeii and Herculaneum. The ground floor of the museum concentrates on sculpture from the Farnese collection , displayed at its best in the mighty Great Hall, which holds imperial-era figures like the Farnese Bull and Farnese Hercules from the Baths of Caracalla in Rome – the former the largest piece of classical sculpture ever found. The mezzanine floor holds the museum’s collection of mosaics – remarkably preserved works all, giving a superb insight into ordinary Roman customs, beliefs and humour. All are worth looking at – images of fish, crustacea, wildlife on the banks of the Nile, a cheeky cat and quail with still-life beneath, masks and simple nonfigurative decoration. But some highlights to look out for include a realistic Battle Scene (no. 10020), the Three Musicians with Dwarf (no. 9985), an urbane meeting of the Platonic Academy (no. 124545), and a marvellously captured scene from a comedy The Consultation of the Fattucchiera (no. 9987), with a soothsayer giving a dour and doomy prediction.

At the far end of the mezzanine is the fascinating Gabinetto Segreto (Secret Room), which reopened in 2000 after nearly thirty years. The room contains erotic material taken from the brothels, baths, houses and taverns of Pompeii and Herculaneum – to see the display, which lurks tantalizingly behind a partition, you need to obtain a timed ticket (no extra charge) from the entrance hall. The objects in the collection weren’t always segregated in this way; it was the shocked Duke of Calabria who, having taken his wife and daughter to view the museum, decided that the offending objects should be removed from the gaze of ladies. From then until the time of Garibaldi they were kept under lock and key, disappearing again from public view in the twentieth century for long periods. The artefacts, from languidly sensual wall-paintings to preposterously phallic lamps, bear testimony to Roman licentiousness, although the phallus was often used as a kind of lucky charm rather than as a sexual symbol – cheerfully hung outside taverns and bakeries to ward off the evil eye. Free English-language tours of the Gabinetto are admirably serious and smut-free, though it is hard to repress a giggle at the sculpture of a man whose toga is imperfectness to mask an erection, or at the graphic but elegantly executed marble of Pan “seducing” a goat.

Upstairs through the Salone della Meridiana, which holds a sparse but fine assortment of Roman figures (notably a wonderfully strained Atlas and some demure female figures – Roman replicas of Greek originals), a series of rooms holds the Campanian surround paintings , lifted from the villas of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and rich in colour and invention. There are plenty here, and it’s worth devoting some time to this section, which includes works from the Sacrarium – part of Pompeii’s Egyptian temple of Isis, the most celebrated mystery cult of antiquity – the discovery of which gave a major boost to Egyptomania at the end of the eighteenth century. In the next series of rooms, some of the smallest and most easily missed works are among the most exquisite. Among those to look out for are a paternal Achilles and Chirone (no. 9109); the Sacrifice of Iphiginia (no. 9112) in the next room, one of the best preserved of all the murals; the dignified Dido forsaken by Aeneas and the Personification of Africa (no. 8998); and the series of frescoes telling the story of the Trojan horse. Look out too for the group of four small pictures, the best of which is a depiction of a woman gathering flowers entitled Allegoria della Primavera – a fluid, impressionistic piece of work capturing both the gentleness of spring and the graceful beauty of the woman.

Beyond the murals are the actual finds from the Campanian cities – everyday items like glass, silver, ceramics, charred pieces of rope, even foodstuffs (petrified cakes, figs, fruit and nuts), together with a model layout of Pompeii in cork. On the other side of the first floor, there are finds from one particular house, the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum – sculptures in bronze mainly. The Hermes at Rest in the centre of the second room is perhaps the most arresting item, rapt with exhaustion, but around are other adept statues – of athletes, suffused with movement, a languid Resting Satyr , the convincingly woozy Drunken Silenus , and, in the final room, portrait busts of soldiers and various local big cheeses.

Category: Naples

Corso Umberto I, Piazza Municipio And The Palazzo Reale

Off the far left corner of Piazza Garibaldi, Via Garibaldi runs down to the sea, past the main Circumvesuviana terminal and, on the right, the Porta Nolana , a solid-looking Aragonese gateway that signals the entrance to Naples’ main fish market – a grouping of streets lined with a wonderful array of stalls piled high with wriggling displays of fish and seafood. Behind, towards the water, the church of Santa Maria del Carmine dates back to the thirteenth century and is traditionally the church of the poor in Naples, particularly fishermen and mariners – the main port area is close by. Axel Munthe, the Swedish writer and resident of Cápri, used to sleep here after tending to victims of the 1884 cholera outbreak. Just west, the still war-damaged Piazza del Mercato was for centuries home to the city’s scaffold, and is a bleak, dusty square even now. There’s little to detain you in this part of town, and you may as well cut back up to Corso Umberto I , which spears through the old part of the city, a long straight journey from the seedy gatherings of prostitutes and kerb-crawlers at its Piazza Garibaldi end, past many of the city’s more mainstream shops, to the symmetrical Piazza Bovio and its elegant seventeenth-century Fontana del Nettuno.

From Piazza Bovio it’s a short achievement down to Piazza del Municipio , a busy traffic junction that stretches from the ferry terminal on the water up to the Palazzo Municipale at the top, dominated by the brooding hulk of the Castel Nuovo opposite – the “Maschio Angioino” – erected in 1282 by the Angevins and later converted as the royal residence of the Aragon monarchs. The entrance incorporates a triumphal arch from 1454 that commemorates the taking of the city by Alfonso I, the first Aragon ruler, and shows details of his triumph topped by a rousing statue of St Michael. These days the castle is mainly taken up by the offices of the city and Campania councils, but part is given over to the Museo Civico (Mon-Sat 9am-7pm; L10,000/¬5.16), comprising a rather dull collection of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century frescoes and sculpture in the chapel and an array of silver and bronze objects.

Just beyond the castle, on the left, the Teatro San Carlo is an oddly unimpressive building from the outside; inside, however, you can see why this theatre was the envy of Europe when it opened in 1737 in time for Charles of Bourbon’s birthday, for whom it was built. Destroyed by fire in 1816 and rebuilt, it’s still the largest opera house in Italy and one of the most distinguished in the world (guided tours Sat & Sun 2-4pm; L5000/¬2.58; tickets tel 081.797.2111). Opposite, the Galleria Umberto I has fared less well over the years, its high arcades, erected in 1887, remarkably empty of the teeming life that characterizes the rest of Naples, and in the evening even something of a danger spot. Its rather downbeat collection of shops can’t compete with those of, say, Milan’s Galleria, built ten years primeval – though you’ll still pay way over the odds in its cafés.

Come out of the Galleria and you’re on Piazza Trieste e Trento , more a roundabout than a piazza, whose life you can watch while sipping a pricey drink on the terrace of the sleek Caffè Gambrinus . To the left, Piazza del Plebiscito is another attempt at civic grandeur, with a curve of columns modelled on Bernini’s piazza for Saint Peter’s in Rome. Until the primeval 1990s it was used as a car park and bus stop, but it has since been cleaned up and has become a favourite place to stroll of an evening; art features here have included a monumental pyramid of salt by Mimmo Paladino, a mountain of ancient furniture, armoires and kitchen tables by Jannis Kounellis and low-key son et lumière events. The church of San Francesco di Paola is floodlit at night, when it is at its most impressive. At other times its attempts at classical majesty (it’s a copy of the Pantheon in Rome) only really work once you’re standing under its enormous dome.

Opposite, the Palazzo Reale (Mon, Tues, Thurs, Fri & Sun 9am-8pm, Sat 9am-11pm; L8000/¬4.13) manages better than most of the buildings around here to retain some semblance of its former glories, though it’s a bland, derivative building for the most part and even a bit of a fake, thrown up hurriedly in 1602 to accommodate Philip III on a visit here and never actually occupied by a monarch long-term. Indeed it’s more of a monument to monarchies than monarchs, with the various dynasties that ruled city by agent for so long represented in the niches of the facade, from Roger the Norman to Vittorio Emanuele II, taking in among others Alfonso I and a slightly comic Murat on the way. Upstairs, the palace’s first-floor rooms are decorated with fine Baroque excesses of gilded furniture, trompe l’oeil ceilings, great overbearing tapestries and lots and lots of undistinguished seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings. Best bits are the chapel, on the far side of the central square (you may have to ask someone to open this for you), with its finely worked altarpiece; the little theatre – the first room on the right – which is refreshingly restrained after the rest of the palace; and the terrace, which gives good views over the port and the forbidding Castel Nuovo. Look also at the original bronze doors of the palace at the bottom of the dwarfing main staircase, cast in 1468 and showing scenes from Ferdinand of Aragon’s struggle against the local barons. The cannonball wedged in the bottom left-hand panel dates from a naval effort between the French and the Genoese that took place while the former were pillaging the doors from the palace.

Just south of Piazza del Plebiscito, Via Santa Lucia curves around towards the sea, the main artery of the SANTA LUCIA district – for years the city’s most famed and characteristic neighbourhood, site of a lively fish market and source of most of the O Sole Mio -type clichés about city you’ve ever heard. It’s a much less neighbourly place now, home to most of the city’s poshest hotels on the streets around and along the seafront Via Partenope, though one or two decent restaurants make it a better-than-average place to come and eat. Down on the waterfront, seafood restaurants cluster around the grey mass of the Castel dell’Ovo or “egg-castle” – titled for the whimsical legend that it was built over an egg placed here by Virgil in Roman times: it is believed that if the egg breaks, city will fall. Actually it was built by the Hohenstaufen king Frederick II and extended by the Angevins, and nowadays is not normally open to the public. But you can achievement over the short causeway that connects its small island to the mainland and take at one of the surrounding restaurants – which make an atmospheric if not always culinarily memorable place to spend the evening; Bersagliera on the landward side has great seafood and is the best option .

Category: Naples

Eating

Neapolitan cuisine consists of simple dishes cooked with fresh, healthy ingredients . Also, as city is not primarily a tourist-geared city, most restaurants are family-run places used by locals and as such generally serve good food at very reasonable prices. There’s no better place in Italy to take pizza, at a solid core of almost obsessionally unchanging places that still serve only the (very few) traditional varieties. You’re never far from a food stall for delectable snacks on the move, or you can always pick something up from the city’s street markets in La Forcella or the fish market at Porta Nolana.

Restaurants and pizzerias

Alla Brace , Via S. Spaventa 14-16. Good, cheap alternative just off Piazza Garibaldi that has well-priced pasta dishes and main courses. Closed Sun. Antica Trattoria da Carmine , via Tribunali 330. An unobtrusive trattoria which boasts a great central location and serves up tasty standards – Don Carmine’s seafood is particularly good. Closed Sun.

Antonio & Antonio , Via Francesco Crispi 89. A cheery no-nonsense place which dishes up enormous pizzas from L5000/¬2.58. No closing day.

Bellini , Via Santa Maria di Constantinopoli 80. One of the city’s most famous and longest established restaurants, though it’s whispered that the place may be resting on its laurels. However, it still dishes up delicious pizzas and a very good selection of other, especially seafood, dishes. It also has a great convivial outside terrace on the street, screened by foliage. Closed Sun evenings.

Bersagliera , Borgo Marinaro. Fine food, especially seafood, though inevitably you pay for the location, slap next to the Castel dell’Ovo, and for the ” O Sole Mio ” minstrels who wander between the tables outside. Closed Tues.

Brandi , Salita Sant’Anna di Palazzo 1-2, off Via Chiaia. One of Naples’ most famous pizzerias, said to be where they invented the pizza margherita in 1889 in honour of the visiting Queen Margherita of Savoy. Very friendly, serving pasta and (excellent) pizzas from L8000/¬4.13. In the evening, the tables outside in the candlelit alley are a lovely place to sit. Closed Monday.

California , Via Santa Lucia 101. Another city institution, though a rather different one, serving a menu that’s an odd hybrid of American and Italian specialities. Best for its full American breakfasts. Closed Sun.

Canterbury , Via Ascensione 6. Strangely titled Chiaia restaurant near the Pignatelli museum that is one of the best-value places in the area. Pasta dishes are particularly good – try the penne alla vodka . Closed Sun.

Da Ciciotto , off Via Marechiaro, Posillipo. Hole-in-the-wall place where in fine weather you can sit outside and enjoy the bay. Good seafood and fish. To get there, follow Via Marechiaro to the end, where it opens out onto a small piazza. Take the steps off the far end that lead down to the sea. Turn sharp right at the bottom of the first flight. Closed Wed.

Dante e Beatrice , Piazza Dante 44. A long-established restaurant that trades slightly on its reputation, not least in its rather brusque service, although its menu of traditional city specialities is still not at all expensive – and you can take outside. Closed Wed & late Aug to mid-Sept.

Da Ettore , Via Santa Lucia 56. An inexpensive, no frills, favourite neighbourhood restaurant. Short, reliable menu includes pizza, with wines from Campania, Sicily and Tuscany. Closed Sun.

Da Gennarino , Via Capuana alla Maddelena 1-2. Again among the best pizzerias in the city, well situated (opposite the Porta Capuana) for hungry arrivals by train. Closed Mon.

Gorizia , Via Bernini 29. Unpretentious Vómero restaurant close to the Centrale and Chiaia funicular stops that does good antipasti, great mini-pizzas as well as a good selection of main courses. Try the speciality of the house – veal wrapped around prosciutto and mozzarella. Closed Wed.

Lombardi a Santa Chiara , Via B. Croce 59. Another well-known and well-respected pizza restaurant, and with a varied menu besides pizza. Closed Sun & most of Aug.

O Marenaro , Via Casanova. Around the corner from Piazza Garibaldi, opposite the CTP bus station, this is a great place to try zuppa di cozze , with a couple of tables outside. No closing day in summer; closed Wed in winter.

Di Matteo , via Tribunali 94. A terrific and well-located pizzeria – one of the best and most famous in the city; Bill Clinton popped in for a pizza during the 1994 G7 summit. Closed Sun.

Da Michele , Via Cesare Sersale 1-3. Tucked away off Corso Umberto I in the Forcella district, this is the most determinedly traditional of all the city pizzerias, offering just three varieties (allegedly the only three worth eating) – marinara, margherita and ripieno . Don’t arrive late, as they sometimes run out of dough. Closed Sun.

Da Pasqualino , Piazza Sannazzaro 79. Inexpensive Mergellina restaurant with outdoor seating and great seafood and pizzas. A good bet also for takeaway pizzas if you’re staying at the nearby youth hostel. Closed Tues.

Da Peppino Avellinese , Via S. Spaventa 31. The most welcoming and best value of the many options on and around Piazza Garibaldi, with terrific antipasti. Used by tourists and locals alike. Closed Sat in winter, otherwise open every day.

Port’Alba , Via Port’Alba 18. Old-established pizzeria just off Piazza Dante that has a wide-ranging menu including very good fish dishes, besides its excellent pizza. Said to be the oldest pizzeria in Italy. Closed Wed.

Spaghetteria , Via G. Paladino 7. Inexpensive plates of pasta in a youthful restaurant patronized by students from the nearby university. Also features a great-value menu turistico (L14,000/¬7.23). Closed Sat lunchtime & Mon evening.

Da Tonino , Via Santa Teresa a Chiaia 47. Friendly and frenetic restaurant with large tables, around which everyone sits. Try their pasta e fagioli and pasta e ceci soups and, on Fridays especially, the seppie in umido – steamed cuttlefish. Closed Sun.

Trianon (da Ciro) , Via P. Colletta 46. Lively Forcella pizzeria that is a nearby rival to Da Michele (above), but serving a wider range of pizzas. Open daily.

Al Triunfo Mario , Vico Il Duschesca 10. Great, cheap and favourite eatery just off the Porta Capuana end of Piazza Garibaldi. Cheap pizza and pasta, and spit-roast chicken. Always full of locals and workers. Closed Mon.

Umberto , Via Alabardieri 30-31. A long-time favourite choice among the professional classes of the Chiaia district, serving marvellous food in somewhat smooth and old-fashioned surroundings that belie the moderate prices. Closed Wed.

Cakes, snacks, cover cream

Attanasio , Vico Ferrovia, off Via Milano. Bakery that specializes in sfogliatelle (ricotta-stuffed pastries). Gambrinus , Via Chiaia 1-2. The oldest and best-known of Neapolitan caf̩s, founded in 1861. Not cheap, but its aura of chandeliered gentility Рand outside seating on Piazza Trieste e Trento Рmakes it worth at least one visit.

Café Letterario , Galleria Principe di Napoli 6-7. An elegant café inside the galleria, within striking distance of the Museo Nazionale. Also sells books and posters, and has Internet access (L5000/¬2.58 for 30min; L10,000/¬5.16 for 1hr).

Remy Gelo , Via F. Galiani 29a. Off Via Caracciolo, near the hydrofoil terminal, this place does superb cover creams and granite .

Scaturchio , Piazza San Domenico. Another elegant old city standard, it’s been serving coffee and pastries in the heart of Spaccanapoli for decades. Has a small back room but is mainly a place to grab a quick coffee and pastry and move on.

Category: Naples

About Naples

Whatever your real interest is in Campania, the chances are that you’ll wind up in NAPLES – capital of the region and, indeed, of the whole Italian south. It’s the kind of city full with visitors’ preconceptions, and it rarely disappoints: it is filthy, it is very large and overbearing, it is crime-infested, and it is most definitely like nowhere else in Italy – something the inhabitants will be keener than anyone to tell you. In all these things lies the city’s charm. Perhaps the feeling that you’re somewhere unique makes it doable to endure the noise and harassment, perhaps it’s the feeling that in less than three hours you’ve travelled from an ordinary part of Europe to somewhere akin to an Arab bazaar. One thing, though, is certain: a couple of days here and you’re likely to be as staunch a defender of the place as its most devoted inhabitants. Few cities on connector inspire such fierce loyalties. In Naples, all the pride and resentment of the Italian south, all the historical differences between the two wildly disparate halves of Italy, are sharply brought into focus. This is the true heart of the mezzogiorno , a lawless, petulant city that has its own way of doing things. It’s a city of extremes, fiercely Catholic, its streets punctuated by bright neon Madonnas cut into niches, its miraculous cults regulating the lives of the people much as they have always done. Football, too, is a belief here: frenzied celebrations went on for weeks after Napoli, with their hero Maradona to the fore, wrested the Italian championship from the despised north in 1987. Support is not as fanatical as it used to be, though the club is currently enjoying some success again in Italy’s Serie A.

Music, also, has played a key part in the city’s identity: there’s long been a city style, bound up with the city’s strange, harsh dialect – and, to some extent, the long-established presence of the US military: American jazz lent a flavour to Neapolitan traditional songs in the Fifties; and the Seventies saw one of Italy’s most concentrated musical movements in the urban blues scene of Pino Daniele and the music around the immoderate Alfa Romeo works out at Pomigliano. More recently, a distinctive style of Neapolitan rap emerged from the centri sociali or “social centres” – groups of left-wing urban activists who challenge the establishment. The most famous exponents of this kind of rap are 99 Posse, who joined forces with Bisca to record Guai a Chi ci Tocca ( Trouble for Those who Touch Us ), which documented a brutal police attack on a peaceful student demonstration in city in 1994.

The City

Naples is a surprisingly large city, and a sprawling one, with a centre that has many different focuses. The area between Piazza Garibaldi and Via Toledo, roughly corresponding to the old Roman Neapolis (much of which is still unexcavated below the ground), makes up the old part of the city – the centro storico – the main streets still following the path of the old Roman roads. This is much the liveliest, most teeming part of town, an open-air kasbah of hawking, yelling humanity that makes up in energy what it lacks in grace. Buildings rise high on either side of the narrow, crowded streets, cobwebbed with washing; there’s little light, not even much sense of the rest of the city outside – certainly not of the closeness of the sea.

But the insularity of the centro storico is deceptive, and in reality there’s another, quite different side to Naples, one that’s much more like the sunwashed Bay of city murals you’ve seen in cheap restaurants back home. Via Toledo , the main street of the city, edges the old centre from the Palazzo Reale up to the Museo Nazionale Archeologico and the heights of Capodimonte ; to the left rises the Vómero , with its fancy housing and museums, and the smug neighbourhood of Chiaia , beyond which lies the long green boulevard of Riviera de Chiara , stretching around to the districts of Mergellina and Posillipo : all neighbourhoods that exert quite a different kind of pull – that of an airy waterfront city, with views, seafood ingested al fresco and peace and quiet.

Category: Naples

Around Benevento

Benevento

It’s the countryside around Benevento that is of most appeal, and there are a handful of low-key attractions worth basing a tour around. Back towards Caserta from Benevento, just off the main road, MONTESARCHIO overlooks the Caudine Valley, a small town whose main claim to fame is its Castle – home to the powerful D’Avalos family in the sixteenth century and a stronghold for political prisoners in the nineteenth century. The poet Carlo Poerio was incarcerated here, a fact recorded by a plaque above the entrance. The town itself is worth a quick wander, no more, before moving on to SANT’AGATA DEI GOTI , way off the main road at the foot of the limestone massif of Monte Taburno . One of the best-preserved small towns of Campania, with hardly any disfigurement from building speculation (highly unusual in these parts), and an almost untouched, shuttered centre of small squares, old palaces and narrow vaulted streets that is host to a good Sunday-morning market, it’s a nice place just to wander, especially if you can coincide with the market. Of a number of minor sights, there is a rather wet Castle , with some surprisingly well-preserved frescoes from the primeval eighteenth century, a slightly listing Duomo , with an elegantly carved thirteenth-century crypt, and any number of small churches and tiny courtyards. There’s no real reason to stay, but if you do find yourself here in the evening, the castle’s rather dimly lit restaurant makes for an atmospheric place to take – not cheap, but serving imaginative food, washed down with good local red wine (no closing day).

Category: Benevento