And less of a bird's-eye view:
In summer kitchen still life:
And environs:
The great thing about traveling is that it starts at the airport. There you are in an unglamorous, interminable line at JFK and you look over and think, I defy you to find an American who owns those trousers. (Note cinching behind the knees and asymmetric stitching.) That man is European. Already. Even before security.
And then on the other side of security--and the Atlantic Ocean--everything looks so interesting and different. The train station in Rome:
The countryside between Rome and Naples on the train ride down:
I happened not to sleep at all on the plane, on account of sitting next to someone who was chatty, and interesting, and the fact that on an Airbus A-300 the flight attendant call button is in the armrest--easily hit by accident with your leg--and was short-circuiting anyway. The call button went off at irregular intervals about every 10-20 second. It was like alarm clock meets Chinese water torture. Absolutely impossible to sleep. (In desperation on the way back from the lavatories, I reached up and turned off the call button of a man who was sleeping. Then the woman sitting next to him, trapped by the window, said she was in fact waiting for someone to bring her water and asked me to do it -- in that way older women somehow ask where no is not an option.)
I was a bit the worse for wear getting into Naples and adopted the strategy of staying constantly in motion. By the way, if you ever want to buy knock-off designer bags or sunglasses, they are better on the streets of Naples than anywhere I have seen. The guidebook said only half of the stuff that comes into the ports of Naples clears customs. By extension, I imagined the bags looked so good because occasional real ones were mixed in. A weird variation on lottery tickets.
Not to say Naples was without the fantastically tacky:
Nice use of Latin.
My first stop was da Michele pizzeria, which I suspected was the Eat, Pray, Love one, and which I can now report (having returned to New York and seen the film) was at the least the location site for the pizzeria in the film. It was a charmingly spare, vaulted room with a level of learned precision and execution you'd more normally see in a surgery suite. I took pictures over people taking pictures, and took one with this charming proprietor,
and of the pizza man, a man with a big spatula,
before taking my pizza to go and eating on the steps of the Duomo.
Stop number one on the 'staying in motion plan' was a Carravaggio, which looked surprising in its natural setting. (I forget how "decontextualizing" museums are, to borrow a word from my friend Isabel.):
Then I set out to find the modern / contemporary art museum, known for having an actually pretty great collection, and a set of murals by Naples native Francesco Clemente. Here is a replication of my process of finding the museum. (1) Hmmm, is that the museum building? It's somewhere around here on the map. . .
(2) Well, the windows look pretty pristine, sort of like they have a scrim around them. This could be a modern art museum. . . .
(3) I think that's the street number, let me check. Rounding the corner. . . .
(4) Oh. Wow. It's definitely a contemporary art museum.
In case one were going to forget this while in the common spaces, the stairwell, for instance:
Those are pieces of paper above the pole on the right.
I went to look at the art and fell asleep on a bench in front of the paintings, waking myself with a snort and a start:
(These are details of much larger works)
Then there was this room of sofas, I think with television monitors:
And an appealing sea of fabrics:
And then I learned I wasn't supposed to take pictures.
It's hard to walk around in Naples and not want to photograph all the narrow passages between buildings, all different and all the same:
On the walk back to the train station, a parting shot of Naples, Madonna of the Fanta:
I met the crew at the ferry and we headed over to the island. Saying that Capri is idyllic is like saying the Vatican is religious.
The ferry ride in rough seas was a little less ideal. While I was off to try not to be sick -- banging my head on a pole as I made a swift exit as the sea swelled -- two or three other members of our group were sick too. An auspicious start of sleep deprivation and lost luggage and disagreeable inner ears. These are the little things that remind you it is not all just a dream as you are whisked away in one of these open air taxis. A shop called Exciting Linen sponsors them:
I love this phrase out of context. I even thought it could be a great girl band name. Candy hinted a few days later that the connotations might not work so well there.
We spent a week in Anacapri in a lovely state of reading, eating, basking in sun, planning lunch, planning dinner while still eating lunch, and--for the jetlagged among us--being offered a glass of wine fairly shortly after waking up those first couple of days. The town square in Capri is called the best drawing room in the world. There was some champion people watching. And here I am with Poppy, lovely daughter of a couple on the trip:
An Italian bride has to dodge a bus on a narrow road out of town:
Here she is again:
We went to Amalfi from Capri:
Where I was reminded of a little known Sol LeWitt book called Sunrise and Sunset at Praiano, in which he simply photographed the sunrise and sunset each day for a period. The book reads like an arrangement of color. I can see how he got the idea.
I took an early morning car to Naples, driven by a lovely Italian man whose cell phone rang incongruously to a Celine Dion track. I took an early train to Rome. It was August in Rome. The abundance of tourists made everything feel like being inside a Thomas Struth photograph. At the Pantheon:
Which, in fairness, was no less majestic for the crowds. You can take a picture like this just casually turning your camera to the ceiling:
A man outside reading and snoozing in his chariot:
The accidental Fiat 500:
