Monday - November 24, 2008
Nostalgic in Naples
If you ever visit the Isle of Capri, and have seen the major points of interest, there is a small church in the town of Anacapri that is definitely worth a visit.
This is the church of St. Michele which is a short walk away from the central square. The most interesting aspect of the church is that the entire floor is covered in hand-painted tiles that show the Garden of Eden, complete with all kinds of animals (including a unicorn) and the scene of St. Michael expelling Adam and Eve.
One can view the floor by walking all around it on a raised ledge or by climbing a steep circular staircase to the organ loft where one gets an overview of the entire floor. It is quite beautiful, and we must have spent a good hour there, admiring the different animals and chuckling over the way the artist had portrayed animals he had probably never seen, such as a camel, an elephant and a lion. Mike particularly liked the lion which had a very winning smile on its face and a rather wild hair-do.
The lady who was overseeing the church that day was very helpful, pointing out the symbolism of a lot of the animals to me in Italian. She also gave me a set of sheets describing the hole scene in Italian that I'm going to take home to my Italian class. It was obvious that she was very proud of this wonderful treasure that her church contained.
After seeing the church, we took a bus back down the hill to the town of Capri, and what a bus ride that is. The road is extremely narrow, being barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other, and it is very twisting. I managed to shoot a few pictures out the window as we descended. At one point, just as we were approaching a truck coming the other way on one side of us, we also were headed for a lady pushing a baby in stroller on the other side. Not knowing how we were ll going to fit on the road, I shut my eyes and trusted that the drivers would sort this all out in time! Somehow they did.
We wandered around Capri a bit looking for a place to have lunch and, being late November, a large number of hotels, shops and restaurants were closed. So we wandered off on a side street and found a family run restaurant that was quite plain and simple, but they served delicious food. I had a plate and spaghetti in a lemon and cream sauce that was to die for, followed up by a glass of lemoncello naturally. Dad took the orders, Mom cooked the food, and their young son, who couldn't have been more than seven or eight, delivered some of the plates looking extremely proud of himself.
We poked around a bit more than took the funiculare back down to the port of Marina Grande to get our hydrofoil back to Naples. Unfortunately, this was where we caught up with three QE2 tour groups so the boat was packed, but we all got on thank goodness or some of us would have missed the ship and been flying to Malta!