Naples Underground

We have decided that we've gone on one of our last USO tours after doing the Underground Naples tour.  Now, don't get me wrong, the USO can be great and gets you to and from the location with relative ease and provides you with a tour guide.  But this tour also had the 10 most annoying people that have been put on this planet.  I think the loudest woman alive was on our trip and I really fought to not tell her to shut the F up about 20 times.  Alas, ladies don't do that and while I wasn't wearing pearls at the time, I did think "If I were in pearls, I'd do something classy and just shrug off this most annoying woman." 

Anywho, Naples has an entire underground section that used to be the cistern for the city under the Roman empire and had individual family cisterns under the Greeks.  Thus, there are all of these underground rooms that have tunnels that lead between them and used to provide drinking water.  In the mid-1800's, some bacteria got into the touffa (which I'm sure I'm mispelling but is basically the volcanic rock left over from Vesuvius exploding and is found just about everywhere here) and made everyone sick.  SO!  They kind of stopped using it.  Then in World War II, when Naples was getting bombed til Kingdom Come basically everyone (can you even imagine why Italians wouldn't LOVE us??!  Weird...), people actually moved down into the cisterns and lived there!  There were children's toys and type writers, beds and luggage all over the place.  We only saw a small portion, but our tour guide said something like 1,000 people lived inside each cistern during the bombing and some stayed down there as long as five years while they rebuilt the city!  Also, Julia Roberts went down there in Eat, Pray, Love and it's pretty famous for that, too.  I think Naples has like 4 total references in American pop culture, so they are all pretty well marked.  Anything Julia Roberts did for a total of 7 minutes in that movie is documented and now a tour of some kind.



Afterwards, we followed our tour guide to an old apartment under which archaeologists found the ruins of a Roman theater.  Someone's cellar was the back stage and a carpenter's shop was the seating area.  A Vespa parking lot or dealership was some other part....  I'm not sure.  At this point, I kind of spaced out and thought "aren't we eating pizza soon?" 


We did eat pizza, not the best we've had, though the tour guide claimed it was where the Margherita pizza was invented.  But, like 1,000 pizzeria's in Naples claim to have invented the Margherita pizza, so you take that for what it's worth!


Fearing that we might have to sit and listen to more asinine conversation, Tom and I snuck out of the dining area and went to buy cool looking pasta, orange flavored cookies and other Neopolitan things.  For dinner tonight: truffle spaghetti!  Mmmm!  Can't wait!