Our day started with a bang — quite literally! When we awoke we heard thunder, and before long the skies opened up and it poured about as intensely as I have ever seen it rain. Fortunately, we had scheduled nothing but breakfast for first thing in the morning, and by the time we were ready to check out of our hotel the thunderstorm departed about as quickly as it had arrived.
Our first stop of the day was the Naples National Archeology Museum. It was close to a mile away, but we decided to walk there to get better sense of some of the other sights in central Naples. Only a few feet from out hotel we stumbled upon yet another famous church, Santa Chiara, the historic monastery of the Poor Clares. As befits its Franciscan heritage, it is a remarkably austere structure still preserving the essential Gothic elements of the original building.
A later campanile provides a bit of Renaissance flavor.
I guess these were the relics of some saint or another, but I could not find anything that particularly explained it to me. John told me that many of you like stuff like relics, though, so I thought I would include the picture anyhow.
It was bright and sunny when we finally reached the museum. The places has an interesting history. It started life as a palace, then became cavalry barracks. For a time it served as the offices and classrooms for the University of Naples. Finally, in the late eighteenth century, King Charles VIII of Naples, a Bourbon, turned it into a museum to house all the art he had inherited from his mother, a member of the famous Roman Farnese family. To this day many of the highlights of the museum come from that original Farnese collection. There is this iconic sculpture of Hercules resting from his labors, a Roman marble copy of a Greek bronze.
In his hand he holds the three golden apples he had stolen from Zeus.
There is also the “Farnese Bull,” a massive tableau that depicts the murder of Dirce at the hands of her nephews. Euripides tells the story in his play Antiope if you need more details.
Shortly after Charles established this museum to house his treasures - and keep his relatives hands off them - the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum began. This is the reason that most visitors come to this museum. Just about everything they could find at those sites that could be pulled off a floor or a wall ended up here. There is this famous picture of Dionysus by a mountain that many assume to be Vesuvius.
The technical mastery of the first-century Roman painters really impressed John.
There are stunning mosaics from these ancient villas here as well.
The enlightened aristocrats of the eighteenth century generally had regarded Rome as a fairly high-minded place of philosophers and poets, so the discovery of huge amounts of erotic paintings and sculptures rather shocked them. They had to collect it, of course, but for two centuries all of this comprised the “Gabinetto Segreto” or “secret room” of the museum. Even until the 1970s visitors needed to apply to see this material. Only around the turn of this century did it become just another part of the museum. And some of the pieces, such as this sculpture of Pan with a goat, can still shock us!
We took a cab back to our hotel hotel and another one down to the harbor. Our destination for today was Sorrento. Many tourists get to Sorrento by taking the Transvesuviana train, but our guidebooks suggested that taking a ferry was not only safer and faster but far prettier, too. We discovered that Naples manages to have a fairly handsome port.
Just after we boarded, John asked some young English guy with an upper-crust accent and and a Morgan Stanley gym bag - no, I didn’t make up that detail - to take our picture.
As our boat pulled away from the dock we were aware of all the places we have not seen yet.
I noticed the many boats from the Italian Coast Guard there. In recent days they have been rescuing thousands of African migrants at sea. I wondered if they were about to do the same today.
Along the way we saw stunning vistas of Mount Vesuvius. It seems so peaceful in these pictures.
But, as you can see from this shot of its caldera, it is still an active volcano and has erupted many times since the famous eruption that buried Pompeii.
After this lovely forty minute ride we arrived in Sorrento. This lovely town is just on south end of the Bay of Naples. It seems like a world away from the frenetic pace of the city.
We are staying a the Hotel Regina. There is an amazing view of the city from its rooftop. That is Mount Vesuvius behind me. I think it was from here that Pliny the Younger documented the eruption in 79 CE.
It is a tourist town, and a place for well-to-do tourists in particular. And, as the current mayor of New York knows, well-to-do tourists love to ride in horse-drawn carriages.
We had made arrangements for Rebecca, John’s niece, to join us on this part of the trip. She is living and working in Antwerp these days. She was originally supposed to arrive at Naples by air and then take a bus to Sorrento. But the flight was delayed and she missed her bus, the last of the day. Antonino, our helpful desk clerk, arranged for private transport. The moment she arrived we wished her off to the “Sorrento Musical” at the Teatro Tasso in the center of town. I knew from the reviews on TripAdvisor that this would be pretty hokey, but sort of fun review of Neapolitan songs and dances. It proved to be exactly that.
Like any of these kinds of cruise ship shows, there had to be people plucked out of the audience for participation. And you can guess who was only to eager to become part of the show!
