Bordeaux and Palmiers

Siena is generally seen as one of the more touristy Italian cities. Up there with Venice, it’s not a place people go to discover the “real” Italy. It’s a gorgeous city that is wonderful for pedestrians, but where Naples and Florence retain the charm of encountering true locals on your travels, Siena is so overrun with tourists that it’s difficult to see anything aside from the postcards and snowglobes sold on every street corner.

But I was in Siena alone for several days, and I somehow managed to find the same charm in Siena that I was able to find in other cities I love so much. Somehow, being alone in a city so filled with people made it easier to find places that were untouched by the tourism that had so invaded the city.

It wasn’t whole piazzas or restaurants: it was little things. Courtyards, piazzettas, tiny little streets that were somehow unknown to the rest of the city. I found a tiny hotel on a little street, somehow close to the Piazza del Campo but still reasonably priced and filled with students like me who were looking, not for tourism or museums, but just to see an Italian city for a little while.

Siena is not my favorite city in Italy. Not even close. But the few days I spent there in the summer of 2007 were eye-opening: when it comes to travel alone, sometimes the best places to discover true culture and things you wouldn’t have seen if you were traveling with a group are the places you wouldn’t expect.

When I was growing up, I was lucky to have parents who wanted to travel. Even considering the fact that they had four children under the age of 12, when I was in the 6th grade, we went to Italy.

We visited Rome, Siena, Venice and Florence, and my favorite by far was Venice. Some compare the gondolas and canal-lined streets with some sort of Disney-esque theme park, but I thought it was magical.

However, it wasn’t until I returned six years later that I truly fell in love with Venice. You see, the problem with traveling with four children under the age of 12 is the fact that every five minutes, someone is hungry, thirsty, has to go to the bathroom, tired… There’s really no feasible way to just walk around the city and explore, which, I’ve since learned, is by far my favorite way to experience a city.

On my infamous backpacking trip after senior year of high school, we visited Venice, staying at a hotel in Mestre, a bit outside of the city, and riding the bus in every day. Because the last bus left Venice at midnight and because we weren’t quite experienced enough with drinking to even consider a Nuit Blanche, our biggest brush with true Venitian nightlife culture was the “spritz.”

We wanted to do what the Venitians did, so when, after a day of walking around the city people-watching, we saw all of the natives, nearly automatically pull up a seat at the nearest outdoor café and order a bright orange beverage, we knew we had to do the same.

As you can probably tell from the picture, I didn’t enjoy the bitter orange drink. But I did love sitting around for the northern Italian version of apéro, the French tradition that I have since come to love. I loved watching the native Venitians. I loved getting to the point with the magical city that happens in every relationship, when the goggles that appear the moment you fall in love start to fade, and you see things as they are clearly.

Venice was no longer the glamorous, magical knight in shining armor that I had met in the sixth grade. Venice was dirty. Venice was bitter. But Venice was real. And that’s the point you need to reach in every relationship, with a city as with a person, before you can truly say that you are in love. I may hate spritz, but I love Venice.

When I visited Naples for the first time this year, I had never been to Southern Italy. I had been as far south as Rome, which, as any Southern Italian knows, is not south at all.

My father’s family comes from Sicily, which is technically not Southern Italy either, but I knew that my roots lay in this country that was so mysterious to me. I had no idea that I would feel so at home in a place that I, and even my father, had never been.

Naples is not a city that most people enjoy. It ranks up there with Marseille as a “dirty” city, a city that is not worth visiting when there are such beautiful things (Capri or Monaco) to see. I have never been to Marseille, but if it really does rank with Naples, then I know one thing for sure: I will love it.

I think people need to give Naples more time. Naples doesn’t jump out and welcome you like Paris or London or Rome. The charm in Naples lies under the grit, behind some of the daunting doors, and within the reign of the camorra*. So much of Naples’ beauty exists behind closed doors: in private courtyards or monasteries that a tourist wouldn’t think of entering. The best meals lie in simplicity: the best restaurants are not those with a view of Capri, but the tiny, family-run pizza places that make simple, homey dishes of pasta and tomatoes and the native mozzarella di bufala. Naples is not a rich city. It is not fancy, like Rome and Milan and the other northern cities. It never was.

Naples is crowded, and in this way, it reminds me of New York. The streets hardly have room for the cars, what with all the pedestrians, stray dogs, scooters and vendors setting up their booths on them. This connection with New York automatically made me think that Naples was a fast-paced city, like my old home, but in jumping to this conclusion, I was terribly wrong.

Time in Naples cannot be so easily defined. Time in Naples does not function like it does in other parts of the world. Naples exists in two times, as so much of Italy does: the present and the past. So much of Naples is in the past. Neapolitans are superstitious and religious, combining both rural folklore of curses and hexes and the traditional beliefs of the Catholic Church in their daily lives. Nowhere else have I seen the mix of traditional Western medicine and pure Christian faith so intertwined in the case of illness or death as it is in Naples.

I won’t say I’ve never met a city I didn’t like. I’m a native New Yorker, and I’m generally more forgiving of cities than most people. That said, I really did not like Chicago. Lancaster, Pennsylvania (the city, not the county) gave me the willies. I really did not like Genoa, in the north of Italy, at all. But when it comes to Naples, I’ll take it, garbage and all.

*The well-known Mafia runs Sicily (and much of New York), but further north in Naples, it is the camorra, the crime organization that is built, not upon families, but upon a well-established hierarchy. The camorra is involved in every business in Naples in some way, and is so ingrained in the commerce and life in Naples that it would be almost impossible to eradicate it.