S Elmo

After the last session our bus crawled through traffic back to Naples.  Three of us hatched a quick plan to go to one of the city's hilltops.  We jumped off the bus, made our way to the funicular -- the cable car that runs up the hill through a tunnel--and then walked to Sain Elmo where the sun was just going down.

S Elmo (13 century)

View of city &  Vesuvius from S Elmo 

Funicular station-- last stop at the top. 

Then we went back down and had dinner at this charming restaurant, Trattoria di Fernando.  I had linguine with octopus and cuttlefish, and Neapolitan meatballs.  Pretty good but over salted.  I must say that the food I had here though quite good was not spectacular either. And, weirdly, there was nary a vegetable to be had here.  All pasta, pizza, cheese (ie carbs and fat).  One wonders whether the population suffers from scurvy...  Best food--fresh ricotta and baba au rhum.  And LOL, I spied guests in a Caserta restaurant eating pizza with knife and fork.  

Reggia di Caserta

A small group from the conference went to see the royal palace during the lunch break on Thursday. King Charles VII the first Bourbon king of Naples built it in the mid-18 century, modeling it after Versailles. (And as with many imitators he made it bigger.) Two of us rented bikes and rode from the palace to the waterfall and back. No time to see interior of palace.

P

Web photo but you can see distance to waterfall 

Napoli-- Citta in movimiento

Naples, Italy.  I was invited to deliver a keynote to a conference, People on the move--culture, rights and geopolitics--organized by Univ of Naples and sponsored by local Forum on Culture and city of Caserta.  The hotel is right on the seaside promenade;  across the bay is Vesuvius looking gorgeously purple at dusk.   Directly opposite the hotel is a 14-c fortress, an old fishing village which now has restaurants and a marina.

The conference is a weeklong affair and I've already missed several days of "dialogue", cultural performance and poetry. The proceedings are held in Caserta, a town about 40 minutes outside of Naples, where the royal palace (mid-18c) is built.  It is also

 the place where the Camorra, the Naples mafia, was born and apparently still controls much around here.  We are convening at the Belvedere di San Luecio, which the king built as a  hunting lodge and then converted to into the royal silk manufactory.  

Belvedere di S Leucio

This afternoon was a panel of writers speaking on exile-- Ahmed Farah Ali "Idaajaa" (Somali-Italy-Syria-Netherlands-Kenya); Romesh Gunesekera (Sri Lanka-London); Dubravka Ugresic (Croatia-Netherlands); Eva Hoffman (Poland-Canada-NY-London). In the evening there was a reading held in the town theater, with authors reading (in English, Somali, Croatian) with Italian subtitles, with Neapolitan musical interludes.  Idaajaa read from the poems he's been transcribing from oral interviews with Somali people (I believe he's collected 10,000).  Hoffman read from a piece on her deep burial of her native Polish when she learned and sought to master English. It was rather cerebral yet it made me weep