BOX 144: Montepulciano to Naples.

Naples is the kind of city where you might turn a corner and find yourself facing an ancient (c. 200 AD; head added in 1657) statue of the God of the River Nile. I was happy with the way this photo turned out, with the vase of pink flowers on what looks like an altar of a little chapel, plus the newsstand, the doors with elaborate lace curtains, and a man in a pink shirt seeming to pose for the picture. I was with my friends Max and Janet on a drive from Tuscany to Sicily in the summer of 1983.

My previous post reported on how I and six others joined Max in Rome at the end of his semester of teaching there, and on how we drove in two cars from Rome to Orvieto. This one starts with our arrival in Montepulciano, one of a string of Tuscan hill towns southeast of Siena. A foodie friend back in Evanston had given us an extensive list of must-visit restaurants, and as I recall it, our itinerary was largely determined by where we would be in time for lunch and dinner--and by where the best local wines might be sampled. Montepulciano, with its "Vin Nobile," was one of those places. Regretfully (as I keep saying), in those days diners didn't think of taking pictures of their food, or even of themselves around the table (we didn't, anyhow). But the architecture was plenty photogenic. Here is the handsome Renaissance Palazzo Nobili-Tarugi, even today privately occupied, on the Piazza Comunale.

I'm surprised that I didn't take photos of other important buildings on that piazza, or of the extremely steep and narrow streets of this hill town (quite a trick to navigate; a lot of places we drove on this trip are now pedestrian-only). But at least I caught a glimpse of the countryside from an archway:

And here is a fuller view of the Tuscan countryside somewhere near Montepulciano:

We stayed that night in Pienza, another great hill town worth exploring, and dining in, but my only photo is looking from a terrace to the land below:

At some point we also visited Montalcino, where I learned from Wayne (our wine expert in the group) about Brunello di Montalcino, possibly the most admired wine of all Tuscany. Again, no photos, but I couldn't not take out the camera at our next stop, the stunning city of Siena, where we parked somewhere on the edge of town and walked to the Campo, where the famed Palio horse-race is run around its perimeter. Here we're looking down on the imposing Palazzo Publico:

Here's another view of the Campo after walking farther down and looking left:

From the Campo we walked over to the other greatest sight/site of Siena, the Cathedral:

(Dazzling as it seemed in 1983, the exterior was much cleaner/brighter when I saw it again in 2001.) We spent a good deal of time exploring the interior:

For lunch (i.e., a full multicourse repast) that day we made a stop in a small walled town near Siena, Monteriggioni, where a restaurant called Il Pozzo had been highly recommended. I must have taken this photo leaning out the driver's window, while our friends' car paused ahead.

Here's another view of the town walls, and of the vineyards below them. The restaurant was well worth the detour, and once again I regret that I didn't take photos of the eight of us at table, where we took a great deal of time ordering, in order to sample a good variety of each menu's offerings while not missing out on the specialità della casa that the better restaurants listed.

Later that afternoon we stopped at nearby San Gimignano, the Tuscan town with the greatest number of its medieval watchtowers still standing:

Here are some of us--Wayne, Zivile, Janet and Max for sure--in the town center, with one of the towers on the left:

It's a better photo with the full view of the curved street, the tower and the austere buildings on the right, but I'll show a cropped version too, partly to single out my friends but mainly for the two conversing Italian gentlemen and their dogs.

Here is one more San Gimignano shot, all geometrical patterns:

From here our group split up. Max and I were heading south in one car while the others were going on to Florence and soon back to the States. The night before, Janet (Wayne and Zivile's Rochester friend, and the one person in the group the rest of us hadn't met before) had proposed that she join Max and me for the trip to Sicily, sharing the car rental expenses, and since she seemed like a good traveling companion, we agreed, and indeed it worked out fine.

Heading south on the autostrada, we chose a town around sunset to stay in overnight. It turned out to be a great choice, if only because shortly after dark, as we were leaving our hotel, we spotted men carrying instrument cases walking in one direction. We found that they were going to a concert hall for the evening's rehearsal of the town's filarmonica, which we were invited to attend. I have no photos, so I won't write more here, but it was an unforgettable experience watching and hearing them rehearse the Poet and Peasant Overture, so please ask me for details if you're interested. Here is a photo of the town before we drove into it--at least I think it's the town. (It looks a little early for sunset; but it was drizzly earlier.) I've tried without success to find a similar image on the Internet, but please ID the town if you can.

Wherever we stayed, the next morning we stopped to visit the Garden of Bomarzo, near Viterbo, still a good ways north of Rome. The garden, built by a member of the Orsini family in the 1500s, is famous for its proto-surreal stone "monsters" and other oddities like an off-kilter stone house. For some reason I don't have a photo of the most famous sculpture, a face with a monstrous open mouth/doorway.

Our goal for the afternoon was to reach Naples, which we did. I had no idea that the spur of the autostrada that we took would exit not into some suburb but, coming out of a tunnel, into the heart of the city itself. This was the most "exciting" driving I had ever done: a city where traffic lights and stop signs seemed to be just suggestions, not commands; where cars freely entered bus lanes and went the wrong way up one-way streets, and pedestrians crossed every which way in front of cars. As the traffic and honking horns more or less forced me to go into those bus lanes, through red lights, etc., while Max and Janet tried to navigate me to a hotel they'd found in our guidebook, I found myself getting into the flow and kind of enjoying it.

But my first photo taken in the city is a vision of complete calm: a statue of what I'm guessing is a Roman goddess (I haven't been able to ID it), presumably taken at the Naples National Archeological Museum, since my second photo is definitely from there, showing the "Farnese Bull," a celebrated (and much less calm) Roman copy of a Greek original.

Restless in another kind of way was the baroque chandelier and ceiling I looked up at, perhaps in the archeological museum, but I no longer remember. Out of doors I took one photo of a typical narrow Naples street, probably at mid-afternoon when most stores were closed for siesta.

That same afternoon I took two photos of the Nile God statue--the one at the top of this post and the one below:

And this is all I have to show of Naples. A week later on this trip I accidentally left my raincoat on a bus in Greece, and it had a roll of film in its pocket. Thankfully I lost only one roll, but in any case I have no other pictures of the city or of Mount Vesuvius. We had a fine time in Naples, including a concert with a visiting orchestra at the San Carlo Opera House (description upon request). Our next planned stop was Pompeii, but when we got there it turned out to be closed on Mondays. After debating whether to look for a nearby hotel and wait a whole day, we decided to move on, to the Amalfi Coast. Any photos I took of our first day there, e.g., of Positano, are also lost, but I have some favorite ones of the town of Amalfi and other places on the Coast that I can share in my next post.