The Getz Files

This is Part I because I have, arggh, lost a bunch of pictures and am trying to recover them.




Spent the first few days in Naples, which is a big, old (2600 years) city with lots of marks of old times and frustrated modernity. This is the square where Bellini, composer of Norma, lived. Now it's got nice restaurants, artsy coffee shops and a gaggle of Camorra-lite drug dealers surrounding it.

Next to the Piazza is Port'Alba, one of the old gates to the city. Naples is replete with statues on the top of buildings, and odd columns covered with decorations, busts and the like. Here's one.

Everybody hung out in Naples at one stage - Verdi premiered Aida there, for example, Caravaggio painted and fought here, and Dante put in some time. This is his statue in Piazza Dante.

We stayed in the Centro Storico, a dark warren of streets still laid out on the plan the Greeks set up so long ago. The streets are tiny and cramped, very gloomy and eerie when it's raining, as it did most of the time we were there. However, every now and then as one walks along - whang! - a huge church appears, set back from the road and soaring up to heaven. This is one of the finest - Gesu Nuovo, with its very weird outside facade. Inside, it's a Baroque wonderland, with decoration on every possible surface.

The streets, as I said, are very old. Not really the kind of thing to drive on, you might think. But this is Italy, and they're not so concerned. Two consequences: in these extremely narrow streets you're forever dodging cars and mopeds (which I think have secured some sort of exemption from the laws of man and God); and almost all the cars have some sort of ding.

Naples has a reputation for being sunny and lively, but in the rain and overcast it can look quite forbidding.

Its most famous museum is the National Archaeological Museum, which is one of the best of its type in the world. All kinds of Greek, Roman, Etruscan antiquities, inlcuding amazing frescoes and mosaics from Pompeii and elsewhere. I must admit my favourite room was the collection of Classical Pornography, much of which was quite raunchy. If they are to be believed, the male organ has shrunk over the past 2000 years. Clearly, as this is a family site, I can't be putting those pics up, but copies are available on request. Here are examples of another type of big head:

One day we decided to go to Positano on the Amalfi Coast. A bit ill-advised because of the weather - buckets of rain, seriously - though we could still see it is a very beautiful part of the world. To get there, you take the very nicely Circumvesuviana railroad.
(This is exhausting - I'll put up more later.)