Having seen enough of Italian driving outside of the cities we camped well outside Naples in a suburb on a train line ready to explore the city. We got an exciting breakfast from a bakery of something like a pizza dough rolled up with sausage and potatoes inside (it was just as excellent as it sounds) and ate it on the train into the town.
We went for a good wander into the old town to find Napoli Sotterranea, a tour of the ancient network of underground tunnels: originally where the Greeks who founded the city quarried the rock for the buildings above, then connected by the Romans and a river diverted into them to create aqueducts and reservoirs to supply water to the city. These apparrently lasted until a cholera epidemic in the 1800s when they realised having your water supply underneath you where you dump all your waste wasn’t a great plan and sent the river back on its original course to dry them out. It then became a massive rubbish dump until the second world war when they concreted the rubbish into the floors of the larger caverns to make air raid shelters. Vestiges of all of these functions remained, sometimes sqeezing through ‘Eddie size’ tunnels to reach the roman reservoirs where there was instead the option to wait by the ‘wall of shame’ for the claustrophobic!
We grabbed a quick lunch in a piazza and wandered towards Vomero for more public transport excitment: turns out Naples has 4 funicular railways! We chose one to get us up the hill and headed to Castel Sant’Elmo. Apart from a very impressive entrance there wasn’t much castle to see, but you can walk around the whole perimeter of the walls with awesome views of the city.
We found a different funicular railway to get back down the hill (An underground funicular, even more exciting!) And a nice pizzeria to finish the day before getting the metro and train back to the van.
Parenting Responsibly 