Italy tour - Naples

The first impression I had when I walked out of the Naples railway station was "Wow! This looks just like Secunderabad railway station." It is pretty dirty especially with the rain that poured the previous night. There are so many people just standing at the exits from railway station with a weird look that I was thinking about Rick Steve's suggestion "Keep your bags close to you." The hotel we chose was very close to railway station, just 200m that we just walked.
The hotel was good for most part. The city itself was interesting. Narrow lanes, loud crowd, thin walls, lot of immigrants. Interestingly we found so many Bangladeshis there. Almost every phone booth, internet center was run by Bangladeshis.

Naples is the birthplace of pizza. You would be surprised that the pizza over here is a totally different concept that what you get from Pizza Hut or Papa Johns. The crust is so thin that it reminds you of Indian Chapati. Tomato sauce is spread over it, with some vegetables and there it goes into the oven. Before they serve you, olive oil (plenty of it) is spilled on the top of the pizza. Good food was a bit difficult to get in Naples.All the recommended ones were below the expectations.

Naples city is probably in one of the best locations I have seen. It has mountains on one side and ocean on the other. Due to its location, the city is sandwiched and hence crowded. City attractions include bunch of museums, couple of churches and archeological sites. The best museum of Naples is the National Museum of Archeology which contains the artifacts found while excavating Pompeii (about which you would read in a while). Another good museum to visit is National Museum of Capodimonte. This museum contains the collection of the Capodimonte family and is a worth a visit. I liked the garden around the museum and the great views up from there. You can see the port, the beautiful coast line, and ever busy city sounds fade away. We had great time visiting these. The toughest part was to get there. You have to take bus transportation and it is erratic. Make sure you check out the schedule before you leave.

Apart from those two museums we didnt do much in Naples. We used it as a base to visit Pompeii which is about 20 mins in train ride from Naples. Make sure you get the museum pass if you plan to visit either of the museums and Pompeii. It would more than pay for itself. We took a train back from Naples to Florence. It took about 5 hours in an intercity train. If we had taken a fast train it would have taken just 3:10hrs, but cost us 3 times :)