PART FIVE

Pompeii: Jeez, what a dump. Haven’t fixed anything up. I don’t know what all the fuss is about - just a lot of rubble. Place looks like a bomb hit it.

Just kidding. We pulled into Naples around eight. Jeez, what a dump. Haven’t fixed anything up. Place looks like a bomb hit it, at least around the Municipal Plaza - they’re building a subway, I think, and everything’s ripped up. You get the impression that fresh mess is an improvement on the standard mess - but we’ll get to that.

On the bus and out to the victim of Vesuvius. Of all the Roman antiquity moments, I was looking forward to this the most - you can’t love ancient Rome without having a special fascination for this place, destroyed in a day, sealed for centuries, then brought back into the gaze of the sun with its skeleton intact, waiting for the imagination of strangers to imagine its intimate details.

But first, a stop at a coral and cameo factory!

What has this to do with Pompeii? Nothing, except that it’s close, and the factory probably has a deal with the tour company. They downplay the coral jewelry, since that’s like a place with a big sign that says CONFLICT DIAMONDS, CHEAP. We queued at the door while a squat young woman scowled at her cellphone and fired off some texts - then she put on a smile, walked us into a room, turned on a DVD about cameos, and left, scowling, texting some more. Then we were encouraged to turn in our vouchers for a beverage. I got a Coca-Cola Light out of the cooler, and a Peche The for Natalie - her new favorite drink. It’s tea, but we call it The - and handed the tickets to the guy by the cooler. He said no, inside, so we gave them back and went yes, inside. Got the same drinks out of another cooler, handed the tickets to the man at the cash register. He said No, only this, gesturing to another cooler stocked with nothing we wanted. Sigh. Okay.

Then we walked to Pompeii, up a ramp by the old docks. The tour guide, a slender tanned blonde Neapolitano named Giaconda, said that one ramp was for pedestrians, and other for cats. Daughter looks at me: really?

“Carts,” I said. She was disappointed, envisioning a steady stately parade of felines heading into town. Once there both wife and child were surprised - my wife didn’t know you could walk around the town, thinking perhaps it would be a small area observed from above; daughter had no idea it was so . . . recognizable. Shops, sidewalks, streets. Once you knew the vocabulary, what was a shop and what was a house, you could get the feel for the town, how the small streets indicated one type of district, and the broad roads the luxury houses, you could infer anything your imagination conjured. The Forum. The Temples. The warehouse with all the stored amphorae and a cast of a man hunched in resignation as the pumix, as Gioconda called it, pelted him like clods of dirt on a coffin lid.

We visited some houses, saw the CAVE CANEM mural, the word WELCOME embedded in the stones in front of a house. And above it all, Vesuvius . . . venting.

“Are those clouds?”

“It’s a cloudless day except for one cloud coming out of Vesuvius? I don’t think so.”

“Is it going to explode?”

“Some day. But not today.”

Some day it will, and there will probably a tour group in progress, and a few people will think “now that’s a good tour. They even give you the volcano” while others stare in horror: well, can’t say I wasn’t warned, but jeez, what are the odds.

Some pictures:

Then we went to another store where we were given limoncella and lemon cream and advised to use the WC. At the top of the stairs - the women’s line went down two flights - there was a sign saying the WC was free, but I could tip the grandmother sitting by the door. I had no coins. I shrugged an apology, pointing to my pockets, and walked past. She snapped her fingers and glared at me and pointed at the basket of coins. I mimed the pulling out of pockets to indicate I had no coins. She pointed at the bottom line of the sign: TIP. I pointed at the top line: FREE.

Back on the bus and back to Naples. I wanted to go back to the ship, sit in a cool room with a cafe americano and write, but my wife wanted to go into Naples for pizza. You’re in Naples! You have to have pizza! She had a point, so we went in to the city. I had one memory of Naples from the high school trip: it’s a dump. But let’s see what it’s like now.

First impressions are often accurate. I know it has charms and people love it and all that, but man, it’s not on my list of places to see again before I die. Chaos I don’t mind; romantically ruined I don’t mind. But it’s just shopworn and trashy and bashed and nicked and shopworn and tired. We found a pizza place, looked at the menu - a slice for five Euros, six Euros - and ordered what we wanted. Turns out the price was for an entire pizza. We each got our own huge pizza. What to do? Eat it all like gluttonous Americans, or leave half like wasteful Americans? Can’t win.

We walked over to a huge glowering castle of remarkable ugliness, with a narrow marble Renaissance-era facade stuck on the front over the medieval entrance. Holes gouged in the door; legs blasted off cherubs.

Inside, a big courtyard. So this is where they heaped the dead during a siege, then. Okay. Back down the path into the city, where we found an enormous building with the date carved in inordinately large Roman numerals, as though that was the most impressive aspect.

Shuttered shops on the ground floor. We could see light inside, so we entered, and hello: a shopping mall from 1885. One of those galleria favored after the Milan example, a work of exqsuite grace and strength. A basilica of consumerism!

But most of the shops on the ground floor were closed, and they looked to be permanently so. A few people sitting around outside the small cafe. Damned sad. But beautiful.

We decided to have a little gelato, because it is an act of verified insanity to be in Italy and not have gelato every day. Asked the clerk in my pidgin Italian: quanto costa uno piccolo gelato? Two, she said. No, goldarnit, DUE. If I’m going to pretend to speak Italian do me the compliment of replying in Italian.

Wandered around some more, since my wife saw a sign for a cameo factory, with an arrow pointing down the street. Six blocks, and no cameo factory, so down some unsavory streets and back to the docks, and thence to the ship. Did I forget anything? No. Except to mention the graceless fountain outside the pizza restaurant - I tried to find a good angle to photograph it, but there just wasn’t one. Maybe this. It really captures the stoner-grin of the stupid horses.

Otherwise it was just busy and annoying, with all the standard elements assembled as if checking off a list. The apartment buildings, the office structures, the few modern buildings - I’m sure it’s nicer when you get to the new skyscraper district, but Naples had the feel of an uncouth ruffian wearing a decent suit ruined by use and neglect. And the slums! Oy. Outside of town we passed fields filled with shacks made of corrugated metal, roofs held in place by the weight of discarded tires, trash in heaps, trash between buildings, trash strewn in an open field awaiting the construction of more shacks.

On every other shack roof: a satellite dish.

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On the ship it was Pirate Night. We got Pirates of the Caribbean bandanas in the restaurant. The menu was pirate themed. (It was also the best meal we’d had on the ship.) There was a pirate dance in the middle of dinner. There will be fireworks on board tonight; the Disney ships are the only ones entrusted with fireworks. Then a dessert buffet and general piratical merriment. I arrred well and hard at the maitre d’ when we entered: it’s table nine I’ll be wanting, me hearties - but once Bradford, our waiter, asked me if I would be dressing up, I explained that my sympathies were with the colonial administrators, just trying to get the money to the mother country without losing it to some thieves. Pirates are interesting, but not admirable, no matter how you gussy it up with yo-ho-hoing and avast-ye-matey exultations of a life unbound from convention and oppression. As all the waiters danced around the room, wearing pirate costumes, I had a vision of a ship 400 years hence, with all the waiters dressed up for Al-Qaeda night, wearing suicide vests and waving automatic weapons.

Topside to watch the sun go down. Sunset in the Caribbean seems to be a quick thing; it’s the only thing they do with efficiency. Here it goes down with spectacular pink and purple shows that drape the islands and mountains in innumerable permutations of the crepuscular palette. Even in Naples it all ends with beauty. It’s Italy; nothing else will do.

NEXT: the pressures of the dessert buffet; Spain again.