Sandro and Marg in Naples: Part Five

March 2002

Monday 18th March

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I had phoned my Dad in Rome, and arranged to visit for the day. We would take the train, arrive just in time for lunch, and take the last train back.

Queuing for tickets at the Central Station was a nightmare – we queued for information first – we needed to know if the Eurostar stopped at Tiburtina station, but the queue, which snaked out of the office onto the main concourse, was being attended to by a single official. He was having to deal with a person who was asking for minute details, and every possible combination of options for a trip across Italy some three months in advance. After several minutes of this, the queue starting becoming fractious, and there was an exchange of words between some in the queue and this man when he eventually left – Oh, no, he’d forgotten something!!!

After getting the information we needed, we knew that the train left within the next thirty minutes, and that a seat booking was compulsory, and that the queue for tickets was at least forty minutes ling. I left Marg in the queue while I tried to buy tickets with my credit card at one of the three machines on the concourse. The first two attempts failed, with the software leading me up dead-ends with no apparent means of restarting. On the third attempt, along with much offered advice from the queue behind me, I managed to get the tickets and retrieve Marg from the queue, where she had been occupied in trying to stop people jumping the queue ahead of her.

We made the train with minutes to spare, and were not too disappointed with the standard of accommodation. The train was clean, quiet and comfortable, and passed through some beautiful countryside. Termini station in Rome had changed since I was last there some 18 months ago – considerable modernisation, but it still took more effort than should have been required to find which platform I needed for Tiburtina.

It was quite a disappointment to arrive at Termini, in the centre of Rome, and not go into town. Instead we took the metro to Tiburtina, transferred to a bus, and arrived at Dad’s just in time for lunch.

The trip back was to a different station in Naples – Campi Flegrei. We assumed that this was next to Central Station, and so we would know where we were, and how to get back to the hotel. The train was an old-fashioned one with corridors and compartments, but still in reasonable decorative state. It was by now dark, so sightseeing was limited.

We arrived at Campi Flegrei to be met by a taxi driver who was extremely pushy. I refused his offer - I wanted to see the map first. The only map we could find was a schematic, and implied we were quite a way from where we wanted to be. The taxi driver accosted us again, and I asked what the price was. When he quoted €50 I nearly burst out laughing, and we got into bargaining mode. Unfortunately, although I can usually manage in Italian, the Neapolitan accent caught me out – I couldn’t understand why he wanted to know WHEN (quando) I wanted to pay, rather than HOW MUCH (quanto)!! When we got outside the station, the situation was much as you’d expect when someone describes the seedier side of Naples, dark, gangs of youths with mopeds and scooters. There was a bar across the road, with busses outside, so I asked which bus to take, and where to get tickets. The bus was right across the road, but nowhere sold tickets! There was a machine in the station – tickets were something like 95 cents each, but the machine refused to dish out the tickets because it didn’t have change for the €2.00 I put in for two tickets. In the end, we waited for a bus and got on without a ticket. We didn’t feel particularly guilty, as we’d bought several daily tickets during the week which we hadn’t been able to use. Again, we retire exhausted.

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