TexasAggie, your report is fantastic. Naples sounds wonderful. I hope your Dad enjoys his wallet (and that he gets to read your report). Now I need to call for pizza. I can't wait for more.

Happy Anniversary, welcome back and look forward to your pictures.

Texas Aggie, I am sure I am not the only one that feels that they were in Italy with you. I never stopped being amazed at the quality of some of the reports. Magazine writers of articles could learn a thing or two here on Fodors.

I am a lover of Naples Sorrento, Amalfi coast etc. Your report had me laughing and almost crying in the same breath. I can even taste your divine pizza! Thank you so much for not only sharing your beautiful trip but for making it such an enjoyable report to read. I can hardly wait for the next segment.

Great trip report, TexasAggie. It makes me feel like I'm in southern Italy once again. Can't wait for the rest of the report. Peace.

Robyn :)>-

Hi TA,

Lovely day in Napoli.

That green herb used on the Pizza...Was it Nepitella???

This is good. I spent the night in Napoli without having had the opportunity to sight see. I really had no desire to return, until I read your report.. To me, that's the mark of a report well done!

p.s. I'm a pizza fan too and had pizza almost everyday the last time we were in Italy. I figured that you cannot duplicate the flavor of a true delicious Italian pizza here in the states, so "get it while you can girl!".

I'm hungry for some pizza......

I mentioned your "Twelve Days of Pizza" tour to my husband last night, and he has now decided that we shall do the same on our next trip to Italy. To him, pizza is the perfect food.

I read him just the highlights of your trip report - the pizza descriptions. As you finish your report, could you please be sure to continue including as much as you can remember about each pizza experience? Licking my lips and waiting... Peace.

Robyn :)>-

Love your title (reports pretty good too!). I'm of the "eat cheap so you can have more days in Euroep" school, and in that respect Italy is the best, becasue of the pizza. Last summer in Italy I know I had pizza at least one meal each day, and occassionally even two. We went out for pizza last night and all my husband could say was "Sicily in less than 6 weeks, real pizza". Why can't they make it as good here.

>Why can't they make it as good here?

Different flour, different water, different yeast, wood-burning stone-hearth ovens.

((I))

"I had Pizza Margherita with little green peppery leaves ALL over it. It was fantastic, the little leaves really made the pizza. They weren’t basil and I don’t recall the Italian word for them"

Was it rucola?

Just as it is difficult for American restaurants to duplicate exactly great Italian pizzas, it is difficult for Italian places to duplicate exactly great American pizzas.

I've had many pizzas in the USA that are just as good as Italian pizzas, they are just different.

DAY 3: "On the 3rd Day of Pizza"
POMPEII –

Rockin’ on the Circumvesuviana:

We walked from the hotel to the station again and caught the 9:37am Circumvesuviana train to the Pompeii Scavi stop (arrived 10:05am). At the St. Agnello stop (a few minutes down the line after we got on in Sorrento), a young guy and girl got on. They looked about 3 or 4 years younger than me and they looked American or Canadian (just my guess from their style of clothes). The guy had a saxophone and the girl had a tambourine, bongo, and (of course) an outstretched hand for donations. They were really pretty good considering the jerking of the train. And so we road to Pompeii, the 2000 year old city, with Elvis, the Beatles, and Kenny G.

The entrance to the sight is literally RIGHT off the station exit and very well marked with signs. We weren’t quite what to do with our ArteCards/tickets so we got in line at the ticket booth. A couple of minutes later we discovered that it was Cultural Week and that admission was free. We got two tickets (they had "gratis" written across them) and headed toward the audioguide booth. It was in this considerably longer line that we became a "charm target" of Mario.

We had already encountered several guides offering 2 hour English tours but their method of hawking was so aggressive that we were a little turned off and had planned to do the audioguide first and only come back to the "live guides" if we didn’t feel like we were getting enough from the audioguides. So much for plans. Mario, a licensed guide, employed that irresistible charm that Italians seem to have perfected. He asked me how old I was and when I said 25, he said "how perfect, I have been leading guided tours for EXACTLY 25 years, you MUST come and be in my group". We were most predictably a part of "Mario’s Group" a moment later for 5€ per person. Watching him round up other unsuspecting tourists was a trip– on one group of older women also in line at the audioguide booth, "why do you beautiful young ladies want to spend 5€ on a stupid machine when I, Mario, will take much better care of you". We waited about 15 minutes for Mario to gather his flock of 20, no more, no less, and Mario’s Group trouped into the excavation sight at promptly 10:30am.

Although I make light of the guides’ methods of rounding up tour groups, these guides are fully licensed and extremely knowledgeable. They are also a bargain in a group and worth every cent (and a lot more). Pompeii is truly vast with easy to miss details at every corner. The guides provide visitors with an overview, a framework of understanding, that aids in further independent exploration immensely. If you want to know what you are looking at, learn its significance and marvel at the ancient ingenuity behind even the smallest details of a building’s construction, hire a guide.

(Stepping down from soap box)...
Our Day at Pompeii - the Most Creative Pizza Yet, a Furry Friend, and Sadly, an Ugly American:

Mario shepherded his flock through the Forum area, the Temple of Apollo, the bath complexes, the take-away food counter shops, the mills, the avenue of tombs, several large urban villas, and the Villa of Mysteries. He provided both historical and archaeological facts at every stop (down to the stones signaling one-way streets and ancient wheel-ruts on the cobblestones) as well as his own insights from twenty-five years of studying the ruins.

DH and I stayed at the very front of the group and he answered all of our questions patiently and thoroughly. The tour ended up lasting 3 hours instead of the promised 2. Aside from us, there were several other people on our group that were truly interested in every single detail and Mario seemed genuinely happy to provide as much information at every stop as we could absorb. The fact that he didn’t even wear a watch to watch the time attests to his passion for the ruins. He dropped his group off at the cafeteria, thoughtfully pointing out the bathrooms. We watched as others paid and were sad to see that only one other couple gave him a tip even though he had provided an entire extra hour to the tour. We slipped him an extra 15€ and he seemed pretty shocked that anyone would give so much. We told him that he had added so much to our visit to the sight that WE were the grateful ones.

We had seen some shade along the Avenue of the Tombs and returned there for our picnic lunch. It seemed strange to me that visitors can sit/climb/stand on stones that are so old. However, it was very obvious that the marble blocks we sat on were placed in the shade to serves as benches so sit on them we did. Lunch on a 2000 year old block of marble surrounded by ancient buildings and funerary monuments was a very cool, albeit a little morbid, experience. I broke out the foccacia bread and sliced salami while DH carved up the cherry tomatoes and hunks of cheese and we built our most creative pizzas of the trip sitting among the ruins. Unfortunately, I let my feet (the only part of me not smeared with sunblock) rest in the sun... and got a very nice-looking zebra-stripe tan line across both of them from my sandals. Great, banding on my feet...

Pompeii is full of stray dogs. They are not aggressive or vicious in the least, and we saw a lot of the guides and Pompeii employees petting them so it seems they sort of belong to everyone and no one. While we were picnicking the scent of the meat attracted one such dog. Being animal softies, we tossed him the remaining slices of salami we had and spent a little while playing fetch with one of our empty water bottles. Hence we made our furry friend who proceeded to march alongside of us for almost an hour before finding a nice spot in the sun to nap.

We stayed at Pompeii until 7pm… yes, 9.5 hours of Pompeii. And we didn’t even feel like was saw 2/3 of everything there is to see. This sight, though tragic, is an ancient history buff’s dream come true. Unfortunately, we encountered the only "Ugly American Tourist" of the entire trip here. We returned to the Villa of Mysteries after lunch to get another look at the frescoes and mosaic floors. We saw a young American guy (probably about 20-21) scuffing all the loose tiles on the mosaic floors and wiping his dirty hands all over the frescoes. His girlfriend lectured him about how he was causing damage and he retorted "I flew five thousand miles to see this crap and I’ll touch it if I want to touch it". Disgusting. Fortunately (and not surprisingly), he had very little interest in seeing the villa and we saw them leave a couple of minutes later without further incident.

We caught the Circumvesuviana back to Sorrento at about 7:35 and were back at our hotel about 8:30pm. We had a disappointing dinner at our hotel’s restaurant (details will be in my hotel review) and got to bed relatively early since Day 4 was going to be Paestum.

Pizza Note of the Day:
We were amazed to see that the 2000-year-old ovens at Pompeii were REMARKABLY similar to the woodburning clay ovens that all of our pizzas had been baked in. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" I guess!

I dug through my trip notes (still scattered on slips of paper in several guidebooks!) for anything else I had written about the pizza with the green leaves.

On the back of the receipt I wrote that the waiter translated them as "rockets" when I asked... so apparently I had "rocket pizza" that night.

I'm not sure if this revelation will help or hinder in discovering what on earth they are commonly called in English!

Rocket = arugula.

Hi TA,

"... the 2000-year-old ovens at Pompeii were REMARKABLY similar to the woodburning clay ovens that all of our pizzas had been baked in.<

If you get to Egypt, you will find that the Roman ovens were remarkably like those 4000 years before them.

((I))

Rocket or arugula is called "rucola" in Italian.

I truly hope that you enjoyed your Memorial Day weekend, TA, and that your internal clock has returned to relative normalcy.

Your trip report has been top-notch thus far, and I want to offer my sincere encouragement for your upcoming installments.

I write and edit copy all day long, and I can honestly tell you that your report has been a pleasure to read.

OK now...who else is ready for Pizza #4?!

TexasAggie, I love your trip report so far and am looking forward to the rest! I posted my first trip report last week and I only wish I was half as entertaining as you!

We too loved Pompeii although we were there in off-season last year and no guides were around. We are definitely planning on returning and taking an actual tour to learn more about the fascinating ruins. As a side note, we too are animal lovers and I spent half my time at Pompeii worrying about the poor homeless dogs. Then, as we waiting for the CV to take us back to Naples, I realized that these dogs know how to work it for the tourists for some food! One even pretended to have a limp (he magically healed once the poor unsuspecting tourist fed him)!

Tracy

I ain't too proud to beg, TexasAggie. Can we please have some more yummy pizza?

(I'm leaving on Wednessday!)