Saturday, May 26th -- We met Georgio this morning for our final coffee. Karen had already left for Spain early this morning, so Georgio had packed sandwiches for us to take on our trip. Our picnic bags each held a ceramic plate with the traditional rooster, and a bottle of wine. Georgio arranged for a cab to take us to our auto rental agency where we packed our luggage and headed to Naples, a trip of about 5-hours. On the way we stopped at Polignano a Mare, a lovely seaside town where we ate our lunch and enjoyed the view.

The drive was uneventful, but the surprise came when we arrived in Naples. We had never been there but had been told that it was like no city we had likely seen before. True in spades. But we were truly unprepared for the place we chose to stay based on Frances Mayes book, A Year in the World, the B&B Avallone.  It's located in the Spanish Quarter of Naples on a street so narrow that it was impossible to believe it could hold one way traffic traffic. It was a two way street with two and three people on scooters hurteling themselves through the street and sidewalks, most without helmets or any regard to their or anyone else's saftey, up, down and sideways between cars, pedestrians, and other scooters. The B&B entry was a cutout in a garage door. When our host greeted us, we unloaded the car that we left on what little space was available and hauled our luggage  through a dark garage and up three flights of ladders steep stairs to the floor that held our rooms. The manager's father told me to follow him to an auto garage about 1/2 mile away at the top of the hill. I dropped the car off and climbed on the back of his scooter and we went back to the B&B.  I've never seen anything like it -- where we stayed, the chaos of the city, the total disregard for life by every driver, the crowds, the decay. I doubt that the pictures I've attached to the blog can provide a real sense of what we saw.









For dinner we walked thorugh the mayhem to a pizza restaurant that has its roots back to the 18th century. On the way, we walked past some of the most maginficent properties you can imagine, surrounded by the decay of a city that no one in their right mind would invest in. I'm afraid that the culture of Naples will prevent it from ever becoming a Florence or Rome.

The pizzas were soggy, the least appealing of any we had in Italy (and we've had many). We reluctantly returned to our B&B to hopefully find some sleep. I will say it was clean, the toilets flushed, and we did sleep through the night.