Just got back from our class weekend field trip to South Italy. I have a lot to tell so bear with me here…
Thursday morning, we got up bright (dark) and early to meet at Termini Train Station for all 69 of us—graphic design and interior design—plus the instructors to get a train to Naples. The first thing we did upon arrival was begin to head into the Museo Archaeologico of Naples. It housed many sculptures, paintings, and a lot of artifacts from places like Naples, Pompeii, and Herculaneum. Before we could enter though, our professors realized that they forgot to allot time for lunch on our itinerary, so we all had 30 minutes to find some food before hitting up the museum. Once inside, we had 3 hours to explore and to sketch. Since this was a class trip, we had sketching assignments: 3 objects from the Homes of Pompeii, 3 sculptures, and 2 of our choice. I’m not much of a “sketcher” but here I was standing in front of statues and drawing them. The funny thing is that it was almost as if most tourists have never seen an art student in their lives... they were taking pictures of us sketching and watching over our shoulders. It was so weird. The museum also had a “Secret Room” that our professors wouldn’t tell us much about. Turns out, it was full of centuries old penis statues and ancient pornography...seriously I have never seen marble statues in positions like that before…
After the museum, Pia (my professor) led us on a weird stroll through the backstreets of Naples. I would compare Naples to New York City, maybe, in terms of density and dirtiness. It was a busy, crowded city with a lot going on. We got slightly frustrated wondering how long we would be walking (with all of our backpacks and such too) until we turned the corner and Pia dipped into this pastry shop. Great, now we all have to wait for her to grab a snack…good thing the entire Interior Design class is taking over the busy sidewalk. But then she emerges with trays full of sfugliatelle which is a pastry that Naples is famous for. They were covered in powdered sugar, super flaky, and filled with a ricotta cheese-candied fruit mixture.
They were phenomenal! Okay Pia, you won us over. THEN we had to take a super packed bus to the train station—Stazione Napoli Centrale, which only half the class was able to make. I was in the first group, and we barely caught a train to Sorrento before it left and the other group just came one bus & one train later). I overheard Chris, the other interior professor saying, “If you get lost, just get yourselves to Sorrento.” Well, I see you all have this plenty organized and under control. It was a little over an hour and a half to Sorrento and the train was not nearly as nice as the first and it was packed, so we got to stand the whole time.
We arrived in Sorrento which was adorable. It was filled with cute streets to shop down. Our groups were split into 3 hotels—graphic design, interior design, and then the rest of interior design. I was in the last group, staying with only 6 other people in a cute hotel with the painting & mixed media professor, Brenda. This hotel was divvied up into 2 double rooms and one triple. When we signed up our names, the 6 of us (me, Lindsay, Liz, Sarah, Emily, and Paige—the usual group) signed up. Emily and I were in a room with a blank slot that later got filled by Chad’s name as he was the last to sign up and every other room was full. We all thought maybe the professors would move people around or something to fix this but apparently they didn’t mind me, Emily, and Chad being roomies for the night. At least Emily and I got a king-size bed and Chad slept on a pull-out “midget” bed. lol
After checking into the hotel, we all met up for a fantastic dinner at a place they call the Lemontree, because it is surrounded by lemon trees all over the restaurant. The University was paying for 10 euro of each of our meals so we just had to pay 18 euro each for an amazing full-course Italian meal, which was pretty exciting because we have been too poor to ever get more than one course. The way Italians do dinner includes antipasti (appetizers), primi (first course, namely pasta), secondi (second course, which is meat or fish), and then dessert. Oh, and a few glasses of white wine. For antipasti, we had a plate of mixed appetizers. I couldn’t name much of it for you—squash blossoms, a lavender leaf with cheese inside, bruschetta, a UFO shaped fried-something-filled-something, and bread. For primi, it was OUTSTANDING spaghetti and ravioli, and for secondi, it was either sea bass (my choice) or veal. Then dessert was “una delizia al limone,” a lemony sauce on poundcake. I bet you’re wondering what went wrong with my meal this time. The onlyyy thing wrong was on my appetizer plate, I had 2 UFO fried things, and no leaf w/ cheese thing. Typical, yet no big deal. Either way, I was stuffffed by the end of that meal. I don’t know how Italians do this all the time.
After dinner, Pia got us all excited for some dancing at the Discotec (bar). Her idea completely. It ended up being just us designers and professors there; our own private dance party. It was quite a good time and we even got to watch Pia get her groove on. And that concludes only day ONE. This blog is going to be a doozy, sorry.
Next day… wake up to breakfast brought to our room from the Italian man at the front desk. He brought us cappuccino and croissants. Mine was filled with nutella! Then we hit the streets for some browsing/shopping before we all had to meet for the train to Ercolano (Herculaneum). To make a long story short, the graphic students were supposed to go to Pompeii but didn’t because it was raining, the meeting time got changed twice, once without my knowledge, and we practically ran to catch the train. Again, more super organization. Herculaneum is a city at the base of Mt. Vesuvius that, like Pompeii, was ruined after the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. While Pompeii got covered in mostly ash, Herculaneum was completely covered in molten lava, and the area we visited was all excavated, preserved ruins from the year 79. It was very cool to see the way Italian houses and shops looked back then and also awesome to see just how well they were preserved. There were still mosaics, frescos, doors, even carbonized wood. We even saw some skeletons of people who had died then. AND we had a sketching assignment to do perspective sketches of the houses.
After wandering the ruins and sketching, it was time to end the field trip, basically. The deal was that after Herculaneum (Friday afternoon), we were free to do whatever we wanted. Some people went back to Sorrento, some back to Naples, and some back to Rome entirely, or to places like Barcelona. And the University is reimbursing us for our train tickets back to Rome at the end of it all. I’m not going to discuss how this situation occurred, but for whatever reason our group of 6 was divided and 4 of them had booked a trip to Sorrento and Capri for the remainder of the weekend. This left Emily and I to make our own plans, which ended up being really fun. We decided to stay in Naples and take the ferry to Capri for the day. So once the trip in Herculaneum had commenced, we headed back to Naples with the professors and then split ways to head to our hostel. Surprisingly, we had booked the same hostel as 2 graphic design students, so we all found our way there to check in together. It was a cute place called 6 Small Rooms, and entirely run by Australians, which was just perfect. The staff and everyone staying there spoke English and it was a really nice break from all the Italian and language barriers in general. Emily and I got our room and then took a walk and got some pizza. Did you know pizza was invented in Naples? We found a great place (and cheap!) with a brick oven and everything. Our pizza had eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, all sorts of goodies, and we got to watch the pizza man make it and everything. When it came out of the oven he put it in a box for us, and to top it all off, it was shaped like a heart :)
The next morning we woke up bright and early to catch a ferry to the island of Capri. There were two ferries- a slow and a fast one. We took the cheaper, slower one to the island after having found the ticket office on the harbor the night before. We did a dry run to see how long it would take us to get there. Success after speaking with a security guard and a bus driver (who tried to take us in the wrong direction) and after we refused his bus service, the security guard said, “Don’t worry...he’s gay!” Anyway, Emily and I made it onto the ferry and watched the city of Naples get smaller, great views of Mt. Vesuvius, and 80 minutes later we stepped off the boat onto the most perfect island I have ever seen. We had such an amazing day in Capri, and apart from the ferry to get there and back, we didn’t pay a cent on the island. Actually I lied; we paid 50 cents each to use the bathroom at one point.
Capri is a gorgeous city tucked into the hillsides of the island and filled with winding streets and stairs up the wazoo. It is confusing at first but once you get past the fact that almost every street feels like someone’s neighborhood, it is pretty simple. If you’re on a street and you feel like maybe this isn’t the right way...it is. The first tip-off was a sign saying “Centro” and pointing up a skinny, winding stairway. After walking up God knows how many stairs (not even mentioning the areas so steep that there should be stairs), you find your way to the center of town, the Piazzetta. What a hike. Once up there, we decided to find our way to the Marina Piccola, where there are some beaches and amazing views (oh wait, there are amazing views no matter where you are on the island). We had arrived at the Marina Grande, the other side of the island. So we followed some hand painted ceramic tile signs pointing toward the Marina Piccola and took a ton of stairs down, down, down until we found the water. There are a few small rocky beaches, but a lot of it is private, belonging to one of the 60 hotels on the island. We learned also, that most of the property belongs to famous, rich people, and that the cost per square meter was out of this world. Also, we found it pretty awesome that there are laws set so that no more building can be done on the island, so no more expansion.
We laid on the rocks of the beach for awhile, soaking up the Capri Sun (I crack myself up) and finding perfectly smooth rocks lol. After the beach, we went back to the center of town. This place is not for the poor... we window shopped Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabana, Prada, etc. etc. I felt embarrassed for my 3 dollar purse when we walked into Prada. We eventually made our way through more winding roads along a path leading us towards il Faraglioni—a series of huge rocks that stick out of the water off the coast of Capri. Keep in mind, we had no map. We were the luckiest two people that day (maybe it was the luck of Emily’s smoothest rock ever haha) because we kept stumbling upon the exact things that we were looking for. We found the Gardens of Augustus which were beautiful (though packed with tourists) and also provided gorgeous views of both Marina Piccola and il Faraglioni.
Everything was so... perfect. Even the flowers in the garden were of indescribably bright colors. It was certainly a day for picture-taking. We stopped for our little snack lunch (that we had brought with us) and took in the views and just stared amazed at the BLUEST water ever. Not only did we find everything we were looking for, but we also stumbled upon the best little known secrets, hidden museums, and the “secret garden.” The Museo Diefenbach was one of these things. It used to be a Carthusian monastery called Certosa di San Giacomo. The place had a marvelous courtyard and the rooms were turned into a museum. The artwork here was few but the ones showcased were extraordinary. Just outside the museum and up the hill/street was a garden that wasn’t very well marked but the sign mentioned that it was open. We wandered in, wondering how we found such a perfect place. We nicknamed it the secret garden because as we walked through, there was not another soul around. It was just beautiful and peaceful and amazing. Here there were awesome views of il Faraglioni as well. We saw some people walking through on our way out, confirming that yes, we were actually supposed to be here. It was getting to be time to head back across the island to Marina Grande to catch the cheap ferry back into Naples by this point. We wound our way back perfectly and then down the stairs upon stairs that we had climbed earlier that day, realizing that it had been quite the hike since going down was almost as exhausting as going up. To an extent. Before we could catch our ferry though, we got distracted by a cute wine shop that offered free tastes. The wine we tried was a chilled red wine local to Capri and oh my gosh was it delicious! I refused the urge to buy 50 million bottles of it and then we got on the ferry for Naples.
When we got back to Naples for our last night, we wandered the historical streets, looked at many little shops, avoided many Vespas cruising through, bought some amazing pizza by the slice for dinner, and hit up the craziest, busiest, people-filled market I have ever seen. We got some apples and cookies from the vendors and then went back to the hostel to relax after an exhausting day. We now had roommates since our room was supposed to be for like, 4 people. They were from Canada (haha surprised?) and really friendly. The next morning we met up with the graphic design girls again, had our free hostel breakfast, and walked back to the train station to get back to Rome.
We got our tickets and found our train, but there was a man sitting in our seats when we got to the correct compartment. This train was totally like Hogwarts Express, from the compartments all the way down to the person pushing along the trolley of food (I wanted to get some pumpkin juice and chocolate frogs haha)...our other trains before this had just been an aisle with seats facing each other. We had to argue a bit with the man in Italian to explain that these were our seats (and we thought we were the wrong ones at first since we were the foreigners and he was the local). He moved his seat and we all sat down in this compartment with a very friendly Italian couple. This may have been one of the highlights of the entire trip. For the 2-ish hour ride back to Rome from Naples, we had a full-on conversation in mostly Italian to this couple. Their names were Pepe and Mariangela. Pepe works at a pizza place in Naples (he even showed us a video on his phone of himself flipping the dough!) and Mariangela is a manicurist. They’ve been married 2 years and they are 26 and 32 years old. They were on their way to Naples for the Napoli-Roma soccer game. We talked a lot and they asked us about studying in Rome and it was such a great experience speaking the language and having this conversation with them. They were hilarious and it was funny when they struggled with an English word or we struggled with Italian (which was probably often) and the way they looked overwhelmed when we were speaking amongst ourselves in English too fast. It’s funny to think how English must sound to those who don’t speak it fluently. Eventually, Pepe started playing English songs on his phone that we would all know like American Boy, Beautiful Girls, and a few Bob Marley songs. Listening to them sing along to the English lyrics was nothing short of hilarious and they got so excited. “Inglese? Si?” And we would say “Bueno!”
Aaand now I’m home, excited to be back and excited to be with my other roomies again too! And I just wrote a freaking novel about my weekend. I’m realizing now that this is just as much for me to remember the trip by as it is to give you guys updates on what I’m doing. So, if it’s interesting...great. I try but I’m just excited to have these types of things documented because so much happens in just one day that I would forget everything if I didn’t write it down. This was an amazing trip, and now I have to study for my Italian test.
Ciao tutti!
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