Architect Abroad

So Naples is one of the Italian cities I haven’t travelled to before and it is kind of an odd place, but with interesting historical reasons for the oddities. The first thing is that this city was built as more of a strategic fortification back in the Roman era, and as such it is a city on the Mediterranean, but has no fresh water. The closest river is about 16km’s away, but wrangling water over far distances was never something that the Romans were afraid to tackle. So rather interestingly the city was engineered over an elaborate system of underground cisterns where each home had an indoor well that connected to the cistern system below ground. There is a whole backstory about the well man who serviced the cisterns (called the little monk) that used to occasionally pop into people’s home, and you know, casually impregnate some wives from time to time when the husbands were out…you can get little monk statuettes that bring luck to your home, but I digress. Anyway, with the cistern system, a cholera outbreak happened and that put an end to using that. That was until the 1940’s when Naples was being bombed in WWII and the government remembered that ‘Hey, remember these empty cisterns, let’s use them to protect our people from the bombing’. So for 6 months or so, tons of people lived underground. The Napoli Subterranean tour was absolutely fascinating and a great way to beat the heat, 40m below the street.

Naples is also known for being the birthplace of Pizza and on a Street food tour we ate and ate until we were absolutely stuffed. From Margerhita Pizza, Folded up Pizza Wallets, to Deep Fried Pizza we tried it all. However, if you are full, don’t forget there is Limoncello absolutely everywhere, Naples has a borderline unhealthy obsession with lemons. Also hot take here, but I am not a fan of gelato. I have tried and tried to get behind it, but alas my low brow taste buds have limited me to a love of Dairy Queen (which probably isn’t even dairy).

My last great thing to say about Naples is that in the ‘Old Country’ I am finding bits of the new, which is architecturally interesting. Some of the art subway stations in Naples are pretty amazing from the main train Station (Garabaldi) sun shading devices that pierce through the lower and upper levels of the plaza, and the seafaring mosiac tile in the Toledo Station done by the Catalan architect Óscar Tusquets Blanca.

With us now at a week into this trip, the day to day reality of travel is becoming easier and more normal…basically we haven’t all killed each other yet 🙂 Upcoming is Pompeii and the Amalfi Coast, will write again soon but ciao for now!