Saturday in Napoli!

The crazy city really came alive for us today. I can’t begin to describe it but Ursonate17 does a better job than I can. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love gives a perfect description I've copied below.

I’ve included many extras showing our time at Madre, the modern art gallery (with a great exhibition of Robert Maplethorpe), the Neapolitan pizza (sooo good!), the Easter processions and my favourite gelato of the trip, served from a mobile gellateria in the back of a scooter - where else?

This is the last of my backblips for Napoli. I would like to thank Tim for his suggestion of this madhouse to visit and for his companionship. I cannot imagine enjoying this city half as much without him. He planned out our days and was always on the lookout for good gelato (not easy to find here). Thank you Tim.

----------------
Elizabeth Gilbert

"Immediately, just a few hours later, we are on the train, and then-like magic-we are there. I instantly love Naples. Wild, raucous, noisy, dirty, balls-out Naples. An anthill inside a rabbit warren, with all the exoticism of a Middle Eastern bazaar and a touch of New Orleans voodoo. A tripped-out, dangerous and cheerful nuthouse. My friend
Wade came to Naples in the 1970s and was mugged ... in a museum. The city is all decorated with the laundry that hangs from every window and dangles across every street; every' body's fresh-washed undershirts and brassieres flapping in the wind like Tibetan prayer flags. There is not a street in Naples in which some tough little kid in shorts and mismatched socks is not screaming up from the sidewalk to some other tough little kid on a rooftop nearby. Nor is there a building in this town that doesn't have at least one crooked old woman seated at her window, peering suspiciously down at the activity below.
The people here are so insanely psyched to be from Naples, and why shouldn't they be? This is a city that gave the world pizza and ice cream. The Neapolitan women in particular are such a gang of tough-voiced, loud-mouthed, generous, nosy dames, all bossy and annoyed and right up in your face and just trying to friggin' help you for chrissake, you dope-why they gotta do everything around here? The accent in Naples is like a friendly cuff on the ear. It's like walking through a city of short-order cooks, everybody hollering at the same time. They still have their own dialect here, and an ever-changing liquid dictionary of local slang, but somehow I find that the Neapolitans are the easiest people for me to understand in Italy. Why? Because they want you to under, stand, damn it. They talk loud and emphatically, and if you can't understand what they're actually saying out of their mouths, you can usually pick up the inference from the gesture. Like that punk little grammar-school girl on the back of her older cousin's motorbike, who flipped me the finger and a charm' ing smile as she drove by, just to make me understand, "Hey, no hard feelings, lady. But I'm only seven, and I can already tell you're a complete moron, but that's cool-I think you're halfway OK despite yourself and I kinda like your dumb-ass face. We both know you would love to be me, but sorry-you can't. Anyhow, here's my middle finger, enjoy your stay in Naples, and ciao!""