Venice to the Bay of Naples

Just re-read the last one...bit of a crap read, hopefully will learn the lessons for this one. Well kicking off from last one we arrived in the centre of Venice on a fairly rubbish day however we were greeted by a stunning canal side picturesque view right outside the train station. Deciding that we shouldn't really spoil the magic of this city on such a terrible day with the forecast not looking so beautiful for the foreseeable future we dropped our bags off at the train station for a few hours and toured the city. We visited St. Marks cathedral and Piazza but also other much less well known but equally beautiful churches and in the process got hopelessly lost; having no map as tourist info charged a ridiculous fee for them. Another gripe about Italy is that all tourist infos I have visited in the past from Belgrade to Zermatt have offered free maps whereas here they have decided that the can provide info but all paper costs at least €2.50 a pop or as in Naples the tourist info had no maps what so ever. Anyway the canals in Venice were something else; I once heard the Birmingham tourist board boasting that they had more canals than Venice. Well maybe so but in terms of density Venice takes first place with me and George nearly falling in one at a dead end. I mean who finishes a street off with a sheer drop into a canal? Furthermore I didn't know it was first completely car free city centre, very enjoyable experience seeing everything from UPS deliveries to rubbish collections happening on canal boats. As I have said, whilst we thoroughly enjoyed our time there we felt that this was a place to savour rather than delve deeper so we took the night train to Naples (13 hours) however we were able to have an entire 6 person carriage compartment to ourselves, RESULT!! A full night's luxury sleeping before arriving at about 10 this morning. Arriving in Naples we quickly decided with our growing beards (more like horrendous bum fluff) and lack of a shower that a youth hostel would come in handy for that night. However upon exiting the train station the smell of rotting garbage was everywhere, worse than Milan. Huge piles of rubbish at the side of streets had developed, some about 40ft long and higher than me. Upon arriving at the hostel we were told that as the Mafia has primary control of rubbish collection and that they had taken large quantities of rubbish off other cities and quickly filled up the last remaining dump and now for the past few weeks rubbish has been piling up.

Undaunted we quickly set off to see the sights of Naples first visiting the nearby castle (name forgotten) then moving through Piazza after Piazza contain art galleries and a very impressive city hall before finally arriving at Aljgustec funicular train station. Here we caught a rather speedy train up to the top of a local hill with stunning panoramic views across the bay including Vesuvius. Descending again we then ventured into an older part of the town with a sort of Christmassy Market type feel at the moment eventually stumbling upon the hostel recommended restaurant. It opened at 7 and there was a queue outside at about 5 to. We were treated to some truly stunning pizza. We thought at €3 for a Margareta they would be fairly small so ordered 3 between the 2 of us as we had missed lunch. Bad call.....At about half 8 we waddled our way of Gino Sorbilo's.

The future. Tomorrow the plans to go to the ruins of Pompeii and if the weather is ok(ish) head up Vesuvius then catch a train to Rome!!