Don't you think it's a bit silly that the city who's credited for the creation of Pizza, an international staple and resident of top 3 foods for every kid in the Northern Hemisphere, has not heard of "Stuffed Crust"? If I've learned anything here, and I have, it is that of the mentality: if it ain't broke don't fix it. In regards to Napoli specifically: if it's broke...well shit.
Napoli must hold a candle in the illumination of places that seem as though they should cave in upon themselves, but stand five times longer than the most functioning of modern cities. I don't understand it. Yesterday I saw a mother, father, and their child weave through apposing traffic at full speed, all three with maybe a knit cap between them. It's lunacy! And beautiful too! Everyone is hugging and arguing and buying meat off the street and honking their horns incessantly and doing that thing with their hands you always see really Italian people do in movies when they're caught in traffic.
I've only been here for maybe twelve or thirteen hours, but it's safe to say it's the zaniest place I've been. Peru included.
Last night we played in an underground theater whose name escapes me. It's something about at any moment it coming down on us. It didn't, but I did keep in mind how we were a stones throw away from Mt. Vesuvius. This theater was wonderful, high arches of granite, the musk of history and dirt, and some strange skinny Italian theater kids, too eager to help out and too strange in their theater ways for me to want to chat too much. OH, theater kids.....
We played well, had a massive pizza as is the custom, and then had some beers at a local bar spinning Can records and filled with books about Hallucinogenic plants. I didn't find any real correlation. Except maybe the Can records.
The two days before we were in Roma. What a place! How did it happen? But before I get into all the tourist crap, and there's plenty of that, I'll just express that outside the epochal columns and Michaelangelo'd paintings people still get drunk and hookers dance to Bad English at dive bars and shady slick and portly guys will try and sell you the digital camera they swiped from some tourist the few hours earlier; before their fourth beer and their fifteenth cigarette. It get's shady here!
Some guy tried to sell me a camera, sell me one of his hookers and then when I declined both, told me in stunning broken English, "I kill you". He might as well have had a knife in his teeth. He did have a rolled up porno mag in his back pocket. I guess that's Roma.
But we were put up in quite the swanky flat, a few blocks away from one of Architecture's grand marvels, the Coliseum. It's so looming and unbelievable I felt tiny. I do feel tiny here in Napoli too. So many people. Who will win in the game of life? How can we win? (?)
We saw all the usuals, Vatican, Pantheon, Mussolini's giant type-writer. Segue: Mussolini, what a dick! Aside from the really awful things he's better known for; he tore down an entire strip of Roman ruins to pave a street straight from the coliseum to his new massive white godless brick of marble, so when Hitler came to visit he'd have a clear view of his new structure. So much history.
Today we're going to Pompeii. I'm not sure what I'm going to think about that, petrified bodies and the like. Once I went to a church in the Czech Republic where the interior was made entirely of human bones. I WAS fascinated and ended up even touching a few skulls. Well I'm not TOO superstitious but within a week I had a breakup, got bit by a German Shepard, had $400 stolen from me and lost my camera. I'm not touching NOTHIN' today.
We're so close to the end. I fly back Tuesday and into the real world again feet or face first. Let's pray for feet. All is well down here in the boot.
