Scugnizielli translates as orphans or urchins, because, again, in poorer times, restaurant owners would feed this to the local street kids. (Much of the food culture in Naples seems to revolve both around eating what was available during impoverished times--in particular, after WWII--and around helping those less fortunate than oneself, the latter of which must have been no small thing when everyone had so little.)
After this, it was time to assemble our own pizzas. Because they let the dough proof for at least 8 hours, we didn't use the actual dough that we'd made ourselves, but some that had been made the night before, and Tommaso showed us how to flatten and shape the dough with this fancy little slap-and-rotate trick that I will never be able to reproduce in my life. (Mike, of course, made it look easy.) Mike made a diavola, naturally, with sauce, fior di latte, salame piccante, and pepepperoncini; I went for a half-and-half, one side with sauce, fior di latte, eggplant and cherry tomatoes, and the other, the traditional margherita (sauce, mozzarella, and basil). We got to try out sticking our pizzas into the oven (with a motion similar to the old trick of pulling the tablecloth out without upsetting the flowers), but Tommaso was kind enough to spin them around inside the oven and to pull them out for us. (I suspect that untrained handling of the pizza peel has probably been responsible for various disasters in past classes). And then it was eatin' time, again.
Mike putting his pizza into the oven, Tommaso with the assist.
Our pizzas! (Mine is the weird one, second-to-back, divided down the center with the strip of dough to indicate which side is which.) People, THESE WERE AWESOME.
Post-pizza class, we walked back into the center to check out the third, and oldest, of Naples' castles, Castel dell'Ovo. There isn't much open to the public on the inside, but one can clamber about on the walks and terraces all sorts.
Approaching Castel dell'Ovo from the west. Supposedly, Megaride, the island on which this thing is built was either the site, or part of the site, of Parthenope, the original nucleus of Naples, founded in the 8th-ish century BC by the Greeks. In the 1st century BC, there was part of massive Roman villa here, followed by a Roman fortification; a monastery; and a Norman castle, built in the 12th century, which (roughly) took its current appearance under Aragonese occupation in the 15th.*
Interestingly enough, many of the cannons at Castel dell'Ovo are pointed towards the city--possibly indicative of one of the Aragonese (and other invaders') methods of keeping the restive natives compliant, and/or part of the Angevin defense of the castle when the Spanish invaded around the beginning of the 16th century, and positioned their guns on hilltop inside the city.
Of course, access to the remnants of the Roman villa was closed the day we were there.
On our way back into the center, we passed Mt. Echia, the other possible/probable site (or part thereof) of Parthenope, and also where one Lucius Licinius Lucullus, a wildly wealthy and successful Roman consul and military commander, built a massive luxury villa and pleasure garden, which occupied this hill and swept down all the way onto Megaride. (Why, yes, the modern word "lucullan" does come from the excessive and splendiferous feasts held within this particular villa. Good catch.)
Then we ducked into the small-but-quality art museum in Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, where the building itself is really part of the artwork...but also they have Caravaggio's last painting, The Martyrdom of St. Ursula. (I guess you could take photos of it, but I didn't. Wikipedia's got a copy.)
Dinner on this particular evening was at Tandem Ragu, a place recommended by Sonia, our food tour guide, for a traditional Neapolitan ragu sauce...and boy, did she hit the nail on the head. I had an excellent salad of chicory, pear, and walnut, topped with some olive oil and salt, and a plate of mezzemaniche pasta (short, wide tubes) topped with the most spectacular Neapolitan ragu (which, from what I could tell, differs from Bolognese in that it's very saucy and very meaty, with the meat in big, tender chunks as opposed to ground, not passing any judgment here, as I deeply love them both). Mike had a plate of tonnarelli pasta topped with ragu and ricotta, and then a trio of massive meatballs in more of that fantastic ragu. (Hey...ragu's in the name of the place, so what else would you eat there??)
The next day, Mike's actual birthday, we headed to our second destination of the trip: Sant'Agata su due Golfi, a tiny little town perched high atop a spit of land jutting out into the Tyrrhenian Sea.
As you might imagine, the views from the drive are spectacular; however, my car photography couldn't do them justice, so I present to you instead this photo of a ginormous tour bus passing one of the tiny, noisy, three-wheeled trucks that seem to be everywhere in these hills.
I love how they'd done a very formal table setting (multiple glasses, sets of utensils, placemats, basket o' bread) so that we could enjoy our creations in appropriate two-star style.
... then met our instructor Nicola (second-in-command to the restaurant's head chef), and were immediately tasked with peeling about a jillion of these tiny red shrimps fresh from the Gulf of Naples. Nicola used the shells and some veggies to start up a stock, and then we moved on to making a dish they actually serve in the restaurant. (Just as an aside, all of the organic fruits/veggies/honey/herbs/poultry/eggs come from the nearby farm of the family who runs this place, and everything else is sourced as locally and organically as possible. Fantastic.)
The first dish we made (but certainly didn't plate--Nicola handled that for us!): wee little broccoli flans with cauliflower, puntarelle, beetroot chips, red onions lightly cooked in sugar and vinegar, and a turmeric/honey/vinegar sauce. Would eat every day.
The next dish, and one of the finest pastas I've ever had, was some homemade (and hand-cut, by us!) tagliolini accompanied by those shrimps we'd peeled, cooked in the shrimp-shell/veggie stock with some lemon and orange peel. Astoundingly good.
Our final dish of the day was a potato gateau--a traditional Neapolitan (crustless) potato pie-like concoction usually filled with cheese and pancetta or ham and topped with crunchy breadcrumbs. Ours was creamy and vegetarian, with a little sun-dried tomato, and filled with a downright decadent amount of mozzarella. (As tremendously delicious as everything else had been, this still might have been my favorite dish of the day.)
As a lovely birthday surprise, they brought Mike a little angelfood-like cake filled with wild strawberries and pastry cream, and topped with a little sugar syrup and a "basic cream" frosting that they'd singed--it tasted like toasted marshmallows!
Sous chef no. 1 on his birthday, with a little Satèn Franciacorta for celebratin'.
That evening, since we were stuffed to the gills, we skipped any sort of formal dinner and took a little stroll around town, and then my goofy-as-all-heck husband declared that we should stop at the local Mexican haunt, El Gringo, for a post-dinner drink. (As one does in small-town Italy...)
Full disclosure: he was a bit peckish, so we decided to try out the "Mexican beans." Um...it was sorta like chile con carne, but with borlotti beans, provola cheese (ooh, smoky), and some sort of chopped sausage. (Very weird, but still somehow compelling. We ate the whole bowl.)
Thankfully, our class the next day was in the morning, because I'd (rather optimistically) booked us dinner at the restaurant proper in the evening. One can't cook at a two-star restaurant and not eat there, I thought, but I suppose you could say we ended up eating a two-star meal three times in the course of two days! (A new record.) But back to the food. We learned how to filet a couple of largeish ocean fish (again, the remainders were thrown into a stockpot with a bunch of veg, for later), and then we assembled our first dish of the day: gnudi (mozzarella, ricotta, and Parmiggiano dumplings!) with nettles in fish consommé.
Not much to look at, but soooooo tasty.
Second dish of the day: fish filet in an herbed bread crust with spring vegetables and zucchini cream. (That color! And also supremely tasty.)
Final dish of the class, and my favorite that day: fish acqua pazza style, which, here, meant fish poached in a white wine tomato sauce with eggplant, zucchini, and cherry tomatoes, served atop a piece of toasted house bread. (Acqua pazza translates to "crazy water," and can be just about any poached fish dish from the Naples area.)
After lunch, in an effort to make ourselves hungry again before dinner, we decided to take the 40-minute walk down what used to be one of the main locals' thoroughfares from Sant'Agata to Sorrento. (Our B&B hostess told us that this was how her husband, a local, used to get to school. "It's a taste of how people used to live here, and the real countryside.") The walk and views are gorgeous, but I have to imagine that life in Sant'Agata before the modern roads and bus system was not easy.
For a while, we walked through what felt like people's backyards, and then it opened out into this view...
...and then we spent some time wandering down a few stone-walled roads...
...and finally into town. Sorrento's center is rather small and packed with tourists, but not charmless: along the main shopping street, there's the partially-15th-century cathedral, complete with Roman columns embedded in its bell tower walls...
...and from a few vantage points there are some gorgeous sea views (and Naples/Vesuvius in the distance).
There's also the tiny, but lovely, 13th-century cloister of San Francesco (where they were setting up for a wedding while we were there, awwwww; and also, there's a fantastic photography exhibit by Raffaele Celentano upstairs).
My photos do it no justice, but there's also a longish stretch of 16th-century Spanish bastion walls--built on Greek foundations, naturally--right into which modern buildings are constructed, and along which there's a lovely grove of orange trees.**
By far the most interesting thing we saw there (sadly, not visitable, but still jaw-dropping) were the ruins of this ancient grain mill waaaaaaaaay down at the bottom of one of the already-dramatic, super deep ravines running through Sorrento. I can't actually find any info on how old this is, but there apparently used to be a sawmill and a public laundry wash house down there as well. When the piazza from which I took this photo was built in the 19th century, it cut off the mill's access to the sea, which meant that all of the buildings down there fell out of use...but it also created this crazy 80%-humidity microclimate which now allows for the growth of all manner of ferns (some quite rare, apparently). Fascinating.
Thankfully, there's a bus that runs back up to Sant'Agata from Sorrento, so we didn't have to hike back up when it was time to head towards dinner at Don Alfonso. When we showed up, many of the people who'd assisted with our class (bringing in wine and dishware, fetching occasional items from the main kitchen, arranging flowers [!], etc.) were on the service staff that evening, and greeted us as though we were old friends. Personally, I was still stuffed from the food we'd made earlier, and so I had just a few a la carte items, but Mike went for the full tasting menu. And for once, I didn't really take notes or photos, so you'll just have to believe me when I say that everything was creative (e.g., my eel ice cream with osetra caviar), as local as possible, and exquisitely tasty. Plus, after dinner, we got to meet and thank the kitchen staff, who were so gracious and delightful, and then to check out their wine cellar, which contains something like 25,000 bottles and is built into a Greek tunnel from the 6th century BC.
That place is un-freaking believable. This tunnel ends at the bottom of an ancient well, which they currently use for aging cheese. (As one would, of course.)
The next morning, we bid a fond adieu to Don Alfonso and Sant'Agata and set off towards Naples again, with one teensy stop in between: Herculaneum. Ohhhh, but I've wanted to go there for decades, and I have to say, it was well worth the stop. Herculaneum is, for those of you perhaps not as psychotic about ancient western history as I, essentially a smaller version of Pompeii, but excavated right smack out of the middle of the modern city of Ercolano. It's crazy. One minute you're in a relatively unremarkable, contemporary town, and suddenly there's a big pit with extensive Roman ruins in it. Incredible. (And also, you know how I feel about archaeology...so here comes a lotta photos.)
View from the entrance down into the ruins of ancient Herculaneum, much more of which remains unexcavated directly underneath the modern city (which you can see on the far side).
There are three levels of Herculaneum to explore: the top (originally ground) level, where all the villas and houses and shops are; the much smaller center level, with the remains of a few temples, a public bath complex (apparently awesome, and apparently closed, at least, while we were there), and a memorial terrace for a local hero (which is approximately where that guy in the turquoise t-shirt is standing, in the center); and the small lowest level, where the city met the beach (and where that massive tour group is, in this particular photo).
On the uppermost level, some amazingly detailed, well-preserved frescoes in the House of the Wooden Screen. (Named thusly due of the presence of an original wooden room divider.)
Entrance to the men's baths.
Absolutely unbelievable colors on the frescoes in the College of the Augustales.
Yeah...I took about a jillion photos of these. So amazing.
Still more gorgeous, fine detail in the unique and aptly-named House of the Black Salon. (Never seen an entirely black-painted room in a Roman villa before.)
View down the Cardo IV Superiore, one of the north/south-running streets.
Mosaic in the nymphaeum at the House of the Neptune Mosaic. (Not so much originality in these names, but I have to imagine, as an archaeologist, it'd help keep things easy to remember...)
Another side of the nymphaeum, topped with theater masks!
In the entrance to the same house is this remarkably-preserved*** wine shop, complete with some original wooden shelving and amphorae...
...and wooden balcony balustrade with partition underneath.
Sign outside the House of the Tailor.
Mosaic flooring in the women's baths. (I love all the teensy jars and things tucked into the centers of the squares.)
Stucco work on the second story of the House of the Samnites...
...which also contains some intricate mosaic floors that could use a little moppin'...
...and some beautiful, ornate, stucco entrance columns.
Same on the House of the Great Portal.
Detail of one of those winged Victories.
The Grande Taberna, a thermopolium--essentially, ancient Rome's equivalent of a cafe or fast-food joint. (Both hot and cold foods were served out of the jars under those openings in the countertop. There were, apparently, a ton of these places in Herculaneum.)
I'm really ashamed I didn't take more photos in- and outside the House of the Deer; it was, I think, the largest and most lavish of all the places open to the public while we were there.
These two photos give you a tiny bit of insight into how detailed the decorations in the place are; there were also, of course, both marble (opus sectile) and mosaic floors and--entirely unique to this villa--small, framed still-lifes painted on the larger walls. Plus a big garden and terrace outside, overlooking what was once the beach and the city's access to the sea. (Like many places, it's now quite a ways inland.)
As for the human remains found in Herculaneum, while Pompeii is famed for its ash casts of people trying to escape (those things are both astonishing and sobering to see), Herculaneum still has actual bones on-site. Not as many as one might expect, thankfully; most of the town's inhabitants had fled after a series of earthquakes and the initial outpourings of ash and rock, but some people who'd sought shelter in the boat houses near the beach remained. We'd thought we'd caught a glimpse of them on the way in, but weren't sure until we made our way down there, where around 300 people, fleeing from Vesuvius' pyroclastic flows, were trapped between the heat and the water and, essentially, were instantly fried alive. The bones weren't discovered until around 1980, almost perfectly preserved by the volume of ash deposited on top. It's more than a little shocking to make your way through a relatively sanitized city, not really connecting it with real people, and then, at the very end of your meanderings, to come across this:
Actual bones of actual people who died in the eruption of 79 AD.
And that's just one boat house; there were 12 in total, all full of bones. (It was somehow weirdly comforting to me that these poor people's final resting place is now directly in front of this lovely, quiet, green, wetland area full of birds and frogs and cattails. It's peaceful and pretty and seems deserved, somehow.)
One last look back. This place is spectacular, and, in my opinion, is more approachable (at least, as an individual visitor, and not in a tour group) than Pompeii. Because the latter is far more vast, it has more variety; it's just much, much harder there to see everything that you might want, considering how huge it is. (Not that that's bad. You'd just need probably 2 days there, if you're like me and a complete nutter about this stuff. But Herculaneum you can see in a half-day.)
On our way out, noticed this 200-year-old model of ancient Herculaneum's amphitheater, which is, as the sign most helpfully points out, still buried under the modern city, and has only ever been accessed by tunnel. (Don't you know the people who found it were absolutely blown away.)
This archeogatto stayed inside today, enjoying the relative indoor coolness and nappin' between these statues. Hee.
After several hours in the sun and heat, we decided to take a risk and grab a bite at the pizzeria right outside the entrance gate, and it turned out to be a good idea; Mike's pizza and my grilled veggie salad at Terra d'Ercole were way, way better than they should have been, in an eatery so close to a major tourist site. (Seriously, it was quite good, and the proprietors were very, very gracious. If you need a post-Herculaneum snack, go there.) Next, we hopped back in the car and made our way back into Naples...a feat which I'd recommend avoiding, if you can; Naples' traffic, especially around the main train station, is utter insanity. (About a jillion cars, scooters, trucks, buses, all jockeying for position on rather narrow roads with zero stoplights and a good amount of construction. And lots of one-way streets.) Mike did a great job, though, and we were somehow able to find our final hotel and make our dinner reservation at Hosteria Toledo, a little place in the Spanish Quarter that's been around since 1951. Our pastas were just fine, but really, the standout of the meal were the antipasti: we shared some zucchini alla scapece (fried and topped with mint, garlic, and vinegar--YUMMO) and this massive, paper-wrapped cone of fried goodness including zucchini, bread, an arancino with pancetta, a ham-and-cheese croquette, and--best of all--fior di latte. Yesssssssss.
The next morning, and our last in the city, we got up and made our way to Santa Chiara's cloisters, which had been closed the first time we visited. It was quite busy, but we made our way in and found this:
A central courtyard full of these spectacularly-tiled columns and benches...
...surrounded on all four sides by spectacularly-frescoed arcades.
Just gorgeous, and each scene on every single bench between the columns...
...and around the central juncture between the two intersecting pathways, is unique. (All of this was completed in 1742.)
After a traipse through the smallish museum and archaeological dig also in the Santa Chiara complex, we made our way back through the historic center to pick up our stuff from the hotel.
On the way, spotted another Pasquale original...!
Passed the utterly intriguing (and, unfortunately, apparently, utterly derelict) Palazzo Penne...
...and this glorious, tiny little market.
Even in just that final, short walk back to our hotel, I felt like this city had so, so much more to offer, and I would be absolutely overjoyed to go back. Naples is just an extraordinary, unique, and intriguing place, packed with my three favorite things: glorious history, gracious people, and good food.
Plus, you know how I feel about Italy, in its entirety. Totally addicted. And speaking of which, up next: a warm weekend in Milano.
*I can't contain myself: SO much interesting name-related history here! First, Castel dell'Ovo means "Egg Castle," and it was so-called due to a legend of the poet Virgil hiding an egg in a secret chamber within the castle. As long as the egg remained safe and intact, so would the castle, as well as Naples itself. Second, the original Greek city here--Parthenope--derived its name from the siren who, after being resisted by Ulysses, threw herself into the sea in despair...and this was where her body washed up. This name is so ingrained here that it pops up nearly everywhere--shop names! 19th-century tiled floors! maps! etc.!--and several times we heard/saw modern Neapolitans referring to themselves as "Parthenopeans." Amazing. (The word "Naples" itself stems from Neapolis--the "new city" formed as Parthenope spread inland in around the 6th century BC.)
**I'd just like to note a couple of things here, as the course of researching these historic tidbits has, as always, led me down quite a rabbit hole. First, Sorrento also possibly takes its name from the sirens, who, according to legend, lived amongst the seaside rocks along Sorrento's coast; or, less fun, it could be related to the Greek word for "flowing together," which is, poetically speaking, what the rivers do here as they reach the sea. Second, the Spanish had to strengthen and enlarge the city walls in the mid-16th century because Saracen and Turkish pirates (ok, maybe just "raiders" would suffice here...) kept attacking the place.
***Ok, ok, I know, the whole point/attraction of Herculaneum and Pompeii is how well-preserved they are, but I couldn't help remarking on that here, over and over, because it's just so extraordinary. (Original wooden stuff?? What?? Too incredible.)
