Naples Guide: Chaotic, colourful...delicious
A love affair with pizza, neapolitans and sfogliatella
I recently visited Naples & woa. Naples is an orgy of senses.
People say you either love or hate it. I get it. It’s chaotic, loud, colourful, overwhelming & delicious. Naples has a very Neapolitan-esk charm…that I LOVED. Although, I won’t lie, I arrived home exhausted needing a day to recover.
We ate…and ate…and ate. Lots of pizza, obviously, jeans frequently unbuttoned at the table.
We did lots of walking to explore the city. There’s an explosion of things to see, hear, smell, taste. And Neapolitans definitely know how to entertain. You’ll find old women selling lucky numbers & charms, a man singing terribly & unabashedly from his balcony with a bucket dangling from a rope for donations, people around Via San Gregorio, where they sell the famous Neapolitan Cornicello/ horn, wearing a “pulcinella” mask throwing salt to ward off bad luck.
One of my favourite things we did was wandering the back streets & neighbourhoods of Naples to watch the sunset over Mt Vesuvius. We found an old man selling fruit from a tiny stall halfway up (so cute) where we bought oranges for refreshments. FYI - This is not for the faint-hearted, it is a STEEP walk to the top. But you can have a spritz to reward your effort at the top!
We stayed at The Spanish Rooms in the Quartieri Spagnoli, an old 18th century building, our host a typical Italian mumma - loud, warm, friendly & very eager to feed us! It had a sunny rooftop terrace, lush with plants, the perfect breakfast spot overlooking Mt Vesuvius.
Delicious things we ate:
❤️ Sfogliatelle - a crunchy, pastry filled with ricotta.
❤️ Fiocchi di neve - a dessert called “snowflake”. Also filled with ricotta & a delicate dusting of icing sugar on top.
❤️ Babá - a light spongey cake soaked in rum. I don’t love alcohol-based desserts so apprehensive but it was delicious, of course.
❤️ My favourite pizza was sausages with friarelli. I’d never eaten friarelli/broccoletti before coming to Italy. It has since become one of my favourite vegetables & I wonder how I’ve lived so long without it in my life?! Bitter, mustardy, delicious.
❤️ Zucchini alla scapece - deep fried zucchini served with oil & vinegar. Such a tasty little side dish.
❤️ Fresh anchovies under oil & sea bream. Fresh anchovies like this can & will change your life!
Places we ate:
🍰 Sfogliatelle - The best sfogliate was from Sfogliatelle Calde, near the train station. It was a Sunday so we waited almost 45 minutes with all the other Italians who were buying them for family lunch.
🍰 Fiocchi di neve - Every morning we would have one (okay, two) for breakfast from Poppella di Napoli, 5 minutes from where we were staying.
🍕 Pizza - We went to La Figlia del Presidente (The Daughter of the President), Dal Presidente (The President) & another place I can’t remember the name of! But you can pick any Pizza place in Naples, they’re all good.
🍝 Osteria al Gobbetto - this place was great! Hectic, busy, Neapolitan. The staff were incredible & it was so cheap! We asked them to recommend some antipasti & they brought out 10 dishes. Not joking. This is where we ate Zucchini alla scapece. For dessert we ate the rum babà with grappa.
🍝 A Taverna Do Re Di Francesco Parrella - This osteria doesn’t look like much from the outside, in fact when we first arrived we wondered if we’d made a bad choice, but this was some of my favourite food in Naples! This is where we ate fresh anchovies under oil that were honestly life changing, as well as whole bream, friarelli, and scarolla cooked with raisins & anchovies. For dessert we ate pastiera - a tart cooked with wheat, ricotta & some kind of orange flavour. I highly recommend this place!! A ‘hole in the wall’, so to speak. They didn’t speak much English which made things fun. Places like this are my favourite - nothing fancy, kinda dodgy looking, raw, authentic, delicious.
Yum. Ciao!
Enjoy, you hungry thing xx
