We stayed on a hostel called Giovanni's Home and that's exactly what is was. As soon as we got there Giovanni gave us the best areas and highlights that we should see in the city, he warned us of the areas to stay away from and gave us an idea of how much it would cost for the things that we wanted to see and of course he told us where THE best pizza place would be in Naples. The building of the hostel was on the third floor with an awesome terrace and was build before Columbus discovered America. The cool thing about Naples is the historic sights to see were actually built within so a lot of the highlights have people living in apartments in the same building. Giovanni drew us a map with the route we should take to hit the important sights so that's what we did the first day. Naples being in Italy one of the main sights to see is the Catholic Churches and they did not disappoint, each one had the most extravagant details in everything aspect you could spend hours in one room, unfortunately time did not permit such things for us. There is a Christmas market in Naples that is open all year round, so of course I went there to check it out and get my own ornament to take home for my tree next year. We got to check out the monastery and the museum that was there, and finally my personal favorite the aqueduct.
Everywhere you turn in Naples there are amazing and beautiful things that are full of stories and history. The first morning that we were there we went into a church and ended up taking a tour of it. It is where the dead were kept in the 14th century up to the 18th. One question that this tour answered for me was "what's with all the skills in Naples?" Well in Naples when people would have a dream that had a "lost spirit" in it they would go to this church and adopt a skull and build it a little nook in the wall with tiles from there house and they would bring the skulls gifts and offering. Touching the top of the skull because they believed that the soul of a person is connected to the skull. This practice went on for serval centuries in Naples till the catholic church band it. Learning all the local history was very cool, and most of the tickets that you would buy included a tour guide, which only made it better. The aqueduct that we toured had so much history in it as well. It was originally build to bring fresh water into Napoli, then it was used for a bomb shelter during WWII. Now however it is used for tours and research. They currently grow plants in here, because of the humidity in the ducts they don't have to water them at all they only provide a synthetic light. As part of our aqueduct tour we got to see some of the history that was uncovered. There was a roman theater that was built on top of serval centuries ago. In the 80s parts of it were uncovered in a woman's wine cellar, it was actually the dressing room for the actors. We were in a group of only 3 so we got to go down there, that's not typically part of the tour so it was cool to see.
Finally the pizza. This by its self is worth of its own blog post but I will resist the earge. Naples is the home of pizza and everywhere you go in Italy will tell you that the best pizza that you will ever have is in Naples. One host said that you can take the same man and have him make pizza in Napoli and in Venice and it will be better in Napoli, this is true. Given Napoli is the home of Pizza so they have had more time to prefect it. It was amazing, we ate it every night while we were there. Honestly writing this blog about it is already making my mouth water. We went out with a larger group the second night so we got to try serval types of pizza that were offerd. It was ridiculously good. A blog will never do it justice, just go to Napoli and try it yourself.
Naples honestly was way more than we expected I absolutely loved it, there is so much to see and do that I am going to break it up into 2 different blog posts so that they are not 10 pages of pictures alone.
Ciao!
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