Napoli! When the moon hits your eye, eat a huge pizza pie

After 10 days without Tim, I was pretty excited to start the next leg of the journey: Capri and the Amalfi coast.

I‘m very used to flying Delta, so Iberia airlines was a bit, um, whatever. If you fly Iberia, it is like the ryan air of Spain really. Bring your own water and snacks, trust me on this. After a long day of travel I arrived in Naples and tried to get a taxi to the hotel Vesuvio where Tim was waiting. PSA: don’t pay more than 35 euro please. There was a guy in the taxi line trying to charge someone 100euro for a ride to the port. That’s insanity. Get the taxi or take the bus straight there.

Grand Vesuvio is just that: grand. a gorgeous old hotel with charm and luxury of another age, truly. The rooms are modernized and spacious, perfect for a couple days in the city. Also, the included breakfast is pretty fabulous with a spread of pastry, fruits, smoked salmon, you need it, they have it. It is not cheap, but for convenience of a short visit, I think worth it. The first evening we made a trip to the rooftop bar to overlook the enormous fort on the waterfront. Rest assured, you pay for the view, but your drink does come with some tasty bits, olives, almonds etc. From here we went hunting for pizza. Antonio Sorbillo is a pizzeria on a quiet back street behind the Main Street for the fort. This started out great. We had a lovely local tomato salad and ordered pizza since they have a sign claiming to be the best in Napoli (there’s a few places with this sign). I ordered a local mozzarella and lemon ricotta pizza with arugula and garlic. It really was fantastic. Then shit got weird. We asked several times in Italian for the bill. Everyone disappeared. Everyone else had their bill but us and the waitstaff was no where to be found. I literally had to go searching in the building for someone to pay. This was far beyond the normal avoidance of eye contact seen often in European restaurants. So great pizza…but um, Yeah.

Also, since people were asking, we were there when the contract for trash removal was good with the mafia. The local joke is that you can tell when in the contract they are based on how bad the trash smells 😂

Day 2: Pompeii coming up