June 17, 2022

Our morning started with our final breakfast in Rome delivered to our room by one of the b&b owners. We enjoyed the breakfast before heading to the train station. We were a little worried because there was supposed to be a scheduled strike by the bus drivers that started right around the time we needed to get on the bus, but we didn’t run into any problems. 

The train from Rome to Naples was booked with our second class Eurail passes, but somehow we were given first class tickets. No complaints from us! The seats had a lot more leg room, we were given bottled water and snacks, and there were less people fighting to get off when we arrived in Naples. It was a great experience and we loved riding in style. 

In Naples, we headed straight to the hotel where we dropped our bags and got lots of suggestions from the receptionists before heading out for lunch. One of the suggestions that we got was a lunch restaurant which we were excited to try. We each got a pasta dish, Stephanie’s had tomato sauce and meatballs and Isabel’s had fish. Both were amazing and we were also given a plate of some sort of zucchini (on the house) which we couldn’t get enough of! At this point, we aren’t sure whether we want to go back there or make sure to hit all their other suggestions. 

After lunch, we went to see Castel dell’Ovo which is right on the water and has gorgeous views of the islands as well as the city and beaches. It was really cool to see and we wandered along the water for awhile before (trying) to get back to the hotel. Unfortunately, after the bus we wanted to get on didn’t show up, we hopped on a different one that had our stop listed, but what we didn’t realize was that it was going the opposite direction. Eventually, we did make it back to the hostel, checked into our room, and took some time to get organized before our next adventure. 

We ended today with a pizza lesson which was very chaotic but ended up being a lot of fun. The meeting point was outside a pharmacy in the pouring rain and the guide was only 10 minutes late. Then, the group all hurried across the street to the restaurant where we realized the group was twice as large as we expected and larger than the guide seemed to expect. Once everything settled down and we started making the dough, it got a lot better and we had a really good time getting to know the other people there. Our guide, Renaldo, taught us how to care for the dough and repeatedly told everyone that the pizza loves us (while also telling us we were all doing it wrong). We made everything from scratch and then got to watch the pizza being cooked (1.5min at 400 degrees Celsius) before getting to eat and enjoy. The pizza might have been the best pizza we’ve ever had and made us very excited to get some more Napoli pizza tomorrow!!