Naples, Italy

On day seven of our trip, we went to Naples Italy. We didn't really have much of a plan, so we decided to just enjoy the culture. The first thing of interest we saw was a huge medieval castle. My husband has always been fascinated with castles, so we decided to take a tour. Castel Nuovo is on the coast and we later found out it was the home of several Italian kings and the site of many famous events and battles. One pope was elected here, and one resigned here.





The castle has beautiful interior architecture and contains some
amazing medieval art. I was fascinated by the statues and carvings of Jesus in which he always holds up a peace sign. Inside the floor there is a Plexiglas window that you can walk on and underneath there are several human skeletons. We tried to take a picture of them, but it didn't come out because of the flash.

















Next we stopped inside a huge shopping mall to have a drink. It wasn't like any mall we'd seen at home. It was inside a gorgeous old building with high glass ceilings, and there were several stray dogs laying in the middle of the main area enjoying the cool temperature of the marble
floors.





At this point, we realized we were hungry, so we asked the locals at the table next to us where we should eat. They told us about their favorite Pizza  and also a small cafe that serves their favorite limoncello.

After roaming the streets for a while, and almost getting ran over by a scooter, we finally found the Pizzeria. The traffic in Naples is completely insane. Everyone drives very fast and they don't follow the rules of the road, but somehow it works out for them. You have to be careful as a tourist though.

The Pizza we ate was unbelievable, nothing like the Pizza in the U.S. It was Pizza Margherita, which has buffalo mozzarella, olive oil and fresh basil and was named after Queen Margherita because it resembled the Italian flag. We had the pizza with a delicious red wine because that's what the locals do. They wouldn't think of eating it with beer.





After eating we took another stroll around the streets to check out the local culture and stopped in a cafe for some cappuccino and limonecello. Limoncello is a sweet, lemony aperitif that Italians usually drink after dinner to help with digestion, and it became my new favorite drink. It was very interesting to watch the locals stop in and get their usual drinks and converse with each other even though we didn't really know much of what they were saying. They were very warm and welcoming and seemed to be delighted that we chose to come into their local cafe. Overall, I liked Naples very much, even though it seemed a little dangerous. But just like any other big city, you just have to be aware of your surroundings.