11 Southern(ish) Italy

We started the Italian leg of our trip in Naples. Noise, traffic, heat, grime. Vaguely reminiscent of India. Except instead of curries and naan, we ate nonstop pizza for a week. There was a popular place down the street from our AirBnB, and though they didn't speak any English and we don't speak Italian, they happily guided us on daily culinary adventures.

Naples was full of interesting neighborhoods to explore and a church on every corner. We also used it as a terrific home base for day trips to Pompeii, Vesuvius, and the Amalfi Coast. 

Katrina: Tell me about Pompeii.
Jack: I liked playing around in the leaves. Chugs liked crawling around in them. We had a great pretend home. We pretended that we were the people that lived there and worked there. So we had new houses. I liked the beer. We saw a theater. There was a pretend show. We took a pretend bath. It's an old town.

Katrina: How did we get to Positano?
Jack: We took a bus that I felt icky on. And Mommy was freaking out about the bus. It was our stop and we couldn't get off the bus. The doors were about to close. Mommy said stop. The girl in front of us said stop, too, to help us. She helped us. We got out. We went to the playground. And we walked to a restaurant.

Katrina: What happened after lunch?
Jack: We lost Daddy. But then we had some gelato, and got some medicine for me, and we saw cool boats in the water. It was hot. We met a man that was from Canada.

Katrina: What did we learn from him?
Jack: Where is the toilet!

Katrina: What was the best part of Positano?
Jack: I liked the pizza!

Working our way north, we departed Naples to spend a week in Gaeta: a completely adorable beach town halfway to Rome. It's just a little blip of land sticking out into the Tyrrhenian Sea. We spotted it on a map when we were plotting our Italian trip from Paris, and Googling yielded promising results. We found an awesome AirBnB with a private rooftop terrace walking distance from the beach--and between those two things, that was our week in Gaeta. Just us and the nuns.