A mixed but secure bag of adventures

 On our last full day of Naples, we spent a long hard day seeing more sites starting with the Archaeology Museum. While we have been to many museums with Ancient Roman and Greek artifacts, the Naples museum is a standout. Pompeii and Herculaneum so perfectly preserved the daily goods and art of the 1st century AD, using one’s imagination to fill in what life was like is vastly simpler. The museum has a horde of Roman treasures. Interestingly, the Greek artifacts were outstanding as well. The Greeks founded multiple civilizations in Southern Italy before eventually succumbing to Rome. 

Jane enjoyed riding backward in the cab to the museum.

A relative scarcity of bronze artifacts from ancient Roman and Greek collections was the result of the middle age blacksmiths melting down anything metal they could find after the collapse of a trading economy. The Swiss cheese holes in the Coliseum are from scavengers who removed the metal clips holding column pieces together. Pompeii and Herculaneum preserved bronzes in a snapshot in time, like these full scale horses. It felt like a treasure horde. 

Even furniture pieces were preserved as if they were in a museum for 2000 years. 

So much ancient statuary are only torosos and heads, sometimes even hands or a foot. This museum was filled with complete pieces. Jane said if she were this emperor, she would have had the sculptor beheaded after this. He was shorter, chunkier, and uglier than every statue in the museum. 

Mosaics are no longer removed from the original ruins, but are instead protected in place at sites. Before the mid-1700s, they were routinely removed. The King of Naples at the time built this museum to house the removed works and instituted the policy that mosaics and wall paintings are to remain in place where found. That policy largely continues, as we saw many beautiful paintings preserved at the sites. 

Skippio Afrikanis was a famous Roman general that defeated Hannibal, who thought himself the greatest warrior of all time. He’s been a favorite character of Joel and me for years. Sewing him so lifelike was a treat. Surprise, he looks like our favorite captain of the USS Enterprise, Jean Luc Picard. 

This guys hair must have been his defining feature for the artist to have so painstakingly reproduced it. We very much enjoyed the realism. 

A complete Atlas. 

Jane loves frogs, and she’s posing like them. She bought a reproducing bronze frog in the gift shop. 

This caught me off guard. I’ve never seen Roman glassware so colorful and intricate. I didn’t know they were capable of this artistry, and I would have never guessed first century AD. Pompeii preserved artifacts like this that would have otherwise been entirely lost. 

Looking at the rooms full of everyday objects, like these water jugs, it struck me how relatively unadorned our modern world is. The mid-century modern movement wiped ornamentation out of our everyday and monumental objects. Now we are too cheap to add it back in. It’s a pity, because the little pops of joy on objects being delight. 

A complete Temple of Isis was found in Pompeii. As the Romans conquered new cultures, they just assimilated the gods into their own polytheistic arsenal. The paintings are of rituals dedicated to Isis. 

Isis herself, wearing silk from China. 

This mosaic is found at front doors and warns would be robbers of the attack dog within.

A real surprise (and perhaps trauma for Jane) was the “secret room”. It turns out that Romans had a real taste for dirty art. The gardens in Pompeii and Herculeum were filled with it. It was explicit and in many cases too too much going too too far. Jane had to leave. The museum signage says that nearly all of such objects and art has been destroyed except that found in Pompeii and Herculaneum.  Despite this being the reality of Roman life, this is the only collection of naughty Roman art in the world. It’s all too graphic to put on the blog (really, trust me), except for this gorgeous Venus. She’s in a Bikini.  Apparently bikinis were worn by women in this period.  In Sicily, they found a site with mosaics of a whole bunch of women wearing them for athletic pursuits.  The British found a thong bikini bottom in the bottom of a Sicilian well from the 1st century AD and of course it’s in the British Museum now.No matter what she’s wearing, this Venus is a well-dressed masterpiece. 

Okay, maybe just one naughty sculpture since it’s tamer than the rest. 

After the museum, we did some more wandering around Naples.

We stopped for Pizza Fritta, something none of us had heard of before but is popular now in Naples.  In simplest terms, the chef starts with a raw pizza, folds it in 2 and deep fries it.  

Both Joel and Jane loved the fritta but Jane was somewhat put off by how much food it turned out to be. It was too much of a project.

After Joel and Jane refueled, we headed to the Museum of Torture. This fellow in the upper window almost turned us off, but he was in another museum next door. 

The museum was largely dedicated to medieval torture, particularly for the inquisition.  Some of those tortures lasted legally until the 1970’s in Italy.  No pictures of this museum.

Found a nice salad for Beth afterward.

The restaurant was gorgeous, with the odd detail of a snowman out front wearing a valentine’s heart wreath around his neck.

This must be how you spell Woody in Italian.

We chanced upon an alley that was filled with miniatures and figures: modern, biblical, and period historical for Naples. Some were being made into dioramas.  Each diorama included an obligatory manger scene, adding other anachronistic characters from Naples culture.  I tried to capture the massive scale of this figurine district, but probably failed. We all wondered out loud who was buying all of these figurines and what they were doing with them. 

A gambling good luck charm.

Several stores sold modern or early 1900’s action vignettes, focusing on different professions.  These varied from store to store.  This store featured a weight loss clinic in theirs.  I can’t imagine this in the diorama with the Christ child, but I’m not from Naples I suppose. 

Let’s talk about pickpocketing.  For many years, Jane has been given lessons on how to minimize oneself s a target for pickpocketing.  We wear the right kind of handbags, we place them in front of us with a hand on it.  We never put anything valuable in a backpack.  We are hyper aware of our bags when we brush through crowds.  We never accept something that someone is thrusting into your hand.  And on and on and on.  By middle school, Jane was exhausted with the lessons, and we no longer felt she needed additional training.  We’ve never been pickpocketed, so perhaps some of our concerns and defensive strategies are excessive.  I’ve wondered if I really needed to wear my anti-pickpocketing purse, both to look like a poor cash target and to discourage attempts to access my bag.  Joel even has anti-pickpocketing pants to protect his wallet.  He has further been known to place a sacrificial fake wallet in his more easily accessible back pocket as a decoy.  Maybe we were lucky, maybe pickpockets aren’t common, or maybe our measures worked; we never knew.  Today, we think we know.  Readers of our blog, I present to you a documented pickpocketer.  

Note the woman in a green hat and yellow sweatshirt.  Joel is pretending to make an action shot here, but they were both standing in place.  As I positioned myself far across the piazza to take a shot of this unusual building, I watched that woman watch and hover around Joel’s backpack.  She didn’t know I was watching. The backpack he is sporting is a PacSafe pickpocketing deterrence bag.  Even when we want to open it, it takes two hands and some know how.  I watched her study his backpack and move around glancing at it repeatedly.  Maybe we could write that off as a coincidence, but as we walked away we studied her more.  She would stay mostly in place while creating the illusion of walking somewhere.  We saw her pick a new mark with a backpack to hover around.  She never made any forward progress toward a destination or stayed still to wait for someone.  She was dressed in a strange imitation of a low threat tourist, noticeably missing the mark.  The picture doesn’t betray it, but this was a busy plaza with lots of folks walking by.  She found a high-traffic area. We felt highly confident that she was a pickpocket.  Joel’s wallet and our backpack goods were in tact for today.  

Here she is close up.  She’s pretending to look down at this moment but is just about to turn her head toward his backpack and walk toward them as I watched..

Joe models his still secure backpack after realizing it may have done its job.

We want to take a moment to talk about Diego Maradona.  One can’t visit Naples without noticing the cult of Maradona, because his photos and memorabilia are everywhere.  The first couple of days, we wrote it off as a sports hero worship.  Both as a championship player and later a coach, this deceased hero obviously retains a cult following fandom similar to Dale Earnhardt Sr.  Bars, stores, figures, signs, jerseys… he’s everywhere.  Joel and Jane learned that he was the first to bring a Southern Italian team to victory against the richer and better funded Northern Italian team to win an Italian championship.  This man apparently embodies many layers of deeper feelings of pride in being from Naples and South Italy.  

He’s turned into a deity in many depictions.

Or Frida Khalo?

He’s the object of at least 25% of all of the tourist goods available for sale.  Here’s a tambourine with his face.

We’ve grown fond of him, and we enjoy spotting him in new poses and places.

Joel and Jane went out on a daddy-daughter adventure to a pizza-making class.  It was a huge win for them both.  They’re confident they can recreate this at home.  One secret revealed was the selection of the cheese. They didn’t use buffalo mozzarella like all of the other cheese we’ve eaten.  They were taught to use fior di latte cheese with less water content, to avoid a soggy pizza.  The sauce project was another success that they now have the skills to recreate at home.  I can’t wait!  

Tasting the homework

They both received their diplomas after graduating from the Pizza School in Naples.  I’m intensely proud.

Now we’re all off to bed, ready for a quick flight to Frankfurt tomorrow afternoon.  We’re going to wrap up some final sightseeing in Naples in the morning tomorrow.  Speaking of wrapping up, here’ s a bonus picture of a poster found all over town.  If we were here Saturday, we most certainly would have gone to watch this: