Naples, Italy (Where We Skipped the Itinerary)
Naples is Italy’s third-largest city – a loud, gorgeous, chaotic metropolis famous for stately old buildings, packed streets, the birthplace of actual pizza, and traffic so legendarily bad it deserves its own warning label. It’s the classic jumping-off point for the big-ticket day trips: the Isle of Capri, the Amalfi Coast, and the ash-buried ruins of Pompeii, frozen in time since Vesuvius blew its top in 79 A.D.
So naturally, we did none of that.
Instead of fighting the crowds to Capri or Pompeii like everybody else, we hopped a ferry across the bay and spent the whole day in Sorrento – and have zero regrets about it. We didn’t have a plan and didn’t want one. We just wandered: poking through the streets, picking up a few “soovenyays” we absolutely did not need, and pointing a camera at roughly everything. By the end of the day we’d taken about a million pictures and could not tell you what’s in most of them.
The crown jewel was lunch – a long, glorious, slightly excessive spread at a cute little sidewalk café, the kind of meal where you order too much, sit too long, watch the town stroll by, and decide this is simply how life should be. No tour buses, no checklist, no rush. Just good food, good people-watching, and a town that practically begs you to slow down. Best “wrong” decision of the trip.
