Discovering Southern Italy

Naples is obviously famous for their pizza, since the modern pizza was invented there. And it was here where I had the best pizza of my life and one of the best meals of my life. Da Michele pizzeria, world famous and for good reason. Not even gonna bother trying to describe it, but every bite was pure happiness and gave me chills, and that’s all I’m gonna say about that.

So we had a good introduction to Naples, but aside from navigating the unfortunate, trash ridden streets, there’s not much else I can say about it. We used it as a home base for our following day trips to the ruins of Pompeii and the Amalfi coast and that’s about it. I’m sorry if you are a fan of Naples, but it’s hard for me to recommend much to do there other than going to that pizza place. But for the pizza alone it’s worth a visit.

In the ruins of Pompeii with Vesuvius in the background

As mentioned before, the first full day we had in Naples was spent taking a day trip to Pompeii, and it turned out to be a great choice. I knew only the basic information about Pompeii: that it’s a city in ruins as a result of the massive eruption of Mt. Vesuvius (which is massive) in 79 AD, and because of the amount of ash that fell from the explosion most of the ruins (including some people and even a dog) have been preserved in the ash. What I didn’t realize is how big the area of Pompeii really is. It was actually a pretty big city back in the day and the amount of ruins that we saw on our trip there was absolutely enormous. It’s only a 40 minute bus ride from Naples, just on the other side of the mountain, and we made the wonderful choice of buying ourselves an audioguide and spending the next 4+ hours there learning more than we ever knew about this place. As already mentioned, the crazy part about this place is that there were in fact some people, and even a dog, on display. The layer of ash that covered these people during the eruption solidified and preserved their decomposing bodies long after they died. You can still see some of the emotions in their faces during their final moments, which turned out to be a pretty powerful scene. I highly recommend Pompeii if anyone finds themselves down in that area of Southern Italy. I also highly recommend our next stop in that area the following day: the incredible Amalfi coast. (I should also mention that we went back to the exact same pizza place we were at the day before and had another incredible pizza there).

I had heard some pretty amazing things about the Amalfi coast before, like people telling me it was one of the most beautiful places they had ever seen, so I had some pretty high expectations for it. It’s honestly hard to disagree with these people after seeing it for myself. We caught this place on a perfect day too, and it was probably the nicest day in December I’ve ever seen. This place is also a quick train ride from Naples so when we got there we figured we could just rent a car or something and drive along the coast, enjoying the views as much as possible. We had also read about a really nice hike along the cliffs that was supposed to be stunning, so that was also on the itinerary. But when we got there the rental guy was just about to leave for the day and it ended up being perfect timing. He only had one scooter left, and neither of us had driven one of these before (especially on Italian roads) so to say we were a little nervous was definitely an understatement. But we managed, and Alex and I agreed to share this scooter and take turns being responsible for each other’s lives while trying to drive this thing.

This ended up being one of the funnest things I think we’ve done on this whole trip. We were able to just zip around anywhere we wanted on the coast and cruise along some of the most scenic roads I’ve ever been on. We rode from Sorrento, our starting point, over to the other side of the coast where our hike was supposed to start and began an incredible hike with absolutely stunning views. That was definitely a memorable three hour hike, and when we got done with it we were pretty excited to hop back on the scooter and cruise through the rest of the coast. We’d be weaving around cars and taking sharp corners on just amazing roads, overlooking the Mediterranean with the coolest looking little towns lining the cliffs just above the water. Again, this is one of those places where I just have to recommend visiting in order to truly grasp the pure beauty and awe of what this place offers. I’ll agree with everyone else when I say that it was at least one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, so we’ll just leave it at that.

Of course, there was a big public transportation strike that same day (Italy likes to strike) but that wasn’t an issue while we had our own scooter. We were a little hesitant about getting back to Naples in time for our 10 hour ferry to Palermo, but it ended up working out okay and we were able to catch our ferry while attempting to sleep on the floor for the entire time, and by the next morning we had made it to Sicily!

I was really looking forward to seeing Sicily and getting a feel for how just how different this place is from the rest of Italy. We didn’t have much time here unfortunately; due to time/flight restrictions only about 4 days total. But we tried to make the most of these 4 days and our first stop was Palermo. We really enjoyed our time in Palermo, with some of the most notable things being the food (of course) and a pretty cool little half-hostel-half-couchsurfing type accommodation. First off, one of the classic Sicilian foods are Arancini. It’s basically a type of rice ball, fried on the outside and filled with meat sauce and cheese, and it’s incredible. We ended up being in Palermo on “Arancini day” which is apparently the only day that offers chocolate, sugar-coated Arancini, and it was unreal. That was for sure the highlight of the food scene so far here in Sicily, and we were really excited to see what other culinary explorations were to be made here. As mentioned, our accommodation situation was actually pretty cool in Palermo as well. We found the place on a hostel website and booked it just as we would book a hostel, but the way it was set up was that the owner just rented out some apartment space and he lived there and cared for the whole place while providing some rooms for guests while sharing his kitchen and living area for the guests to use for themselves. We all met each other and spent the evening getting to know each other a little more, making a really good potato casserole-type dish for dinner.

A beautiful view of Palermo from Monreale

We spent the next day doing a little trip to Monreale, a suburb just outside of Palermo high up on a hill that provided some great views of the surrounding area. It was really cool to get a better idea of the landscape here, and I think Sicily turned out to be a lot more mountainous than I thought. We got some really good pictures up there and saw some really interesting looking vegetarian around the Cathedral gardens. We killed some time and got lunch up there while watching a couple football matches on the TV in the bar and headed back down into Palermo to catch a bus to our next city in Sicily: Syracuse.

Awesome view off the coast of Ortygia

Syracuse was a really nice little city right on the Eastern coast of Sicily, and because we arrived later in the evening, the first thing to do was to settle in at our next accommodation. B&B's are pretty big there, and because it was the offseason we practically had the entire place to ourselves. The owner was one of the nicest staff we've come across so the hospitality situation was really good there. He gave us a map of the city and proceeded to draw and write all over the thing, giving us about a million different recommendations and places to go, and by the end of it we had a collage of circles and arrows to use to navigate through the city. The following day was when we did most of the sightseeing so we walked around the center of the city, which was located on a connecting island called Ortygia, a super old and picturesque area that is basically on the water. Aside from walking around we had a nice little rock skipping session on the beach and basically took it easy for most of the day, eating arancini and gelato every chance we got. We also spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what we were going to do on the last day, deciding how busy we wanted to be before catching our 6:00pm flight the next day to Budapest. We eventually just decided to stick around in Syracuse, and from there take a bus to Catania, where we would fly out. We spent only about an hour or two in Catania before the flight out but we found a little cafe with a really nice owner and we just hung out there to kill time, so I can't really say much of Catania, but overall we had some great interactions with really nice people just about everywhere in Sicily.

I would obviously highly recommend Sicily to any traveler visiting Italy, and I do wish we could have spent more time here, but as is usually the unfortunate case with traveling...there is never enough time. I was also really looking forward to our next stop on the trip, and crazy enough, Alex's last stop of the trip before he would head back home for the holidays...Budapest!