“It might as well be another country…”
That’s what some people say about Naples, the southern-most city on my itinerary. The generalization goes that where Northern Italians (e.g., Venetians) are reserved and formal, Southern Italians (like Neapolitans) are fiery and ultra-expressive. These are the kind of people on whom Americans have based their stereotypes of Italians: vigorously emotional, eloquent in their body language, and “friendly” sometimes in excess. Naples is also said to have more crime--although the closest I came to anything questionable was when three or four completely unknown kids (maybe kindergarten-aged) came up to me in the mall and asked me to buy them some ice cream. I guess that’s an example of Neapolitan “friendliness"--these folks definitely are not shy around strangers!

Princess for a Day
When my friend Anna and I visited the Imperial Palace of Naples, I wasn’t prepared to find such extravagant richness. The palace is a grand edifice fully furnished with historical luxuries. We wandered at our will through rooms full of brocade and velvet, carved wood and gold foil, polished marble and crystal chandeliers. The pictures I took don’t do those rooms justice!

Strangers in a Foreign Land
Click here to hear why my friend Anna was such an important part of Study Abroad.

Pompeii
Of course I had to go to Pompeii. If I hadn't, my professors back in the Classics department would have written me off as an uncultured swine with a distressing lack of scholarly motivation. So I strapped on my sandals and hiked up one of Naples’s main thoroughfares to get to the train station. An hour or two later, I was in Pompeii. Pompeii! I still can’t believe it...I was actually there, touching those ancient buildings, leaping from stone to stone across streets thousands of years old! I should have joined a walking tour, but I didn’t want to stick too closely to anyone else’s schedule--so instead I rented one of the hand-held recorded guides. This turned out to be useless, and I learned much less about the city than I should have. But even so, an afternoon wandering around Pompeii is not to be scorned! (Except for an awkward moment with an old and romantically-unattached security guard. When he offered to let me see some of Pompeii’s closed-off areas, I didn’t think to question his motives…maybe I would have done better to remember that Neapolitan reputation for “friendliness.”) Finishing my long afternoon with a solitary ramble in sight of Mount Vesuvius, I bought an orange juice and made my way home--thoroughly tired and a little traumatized, but with yet another Italian adventure to tell.