Oh how wonderful Italy can be during the winter months (especially when the sun is shining). It’s known to be very peaceful some say while others tell you not to travel to Italy during the winter months because everything is dead, so I’m here to say that it just isn’t true! Just this weekend, I decided to take a drive down to Pompeii for the day with my mom. I wanted to take some photos and to see for myself and to see just how “dead” Napoli would be in December.
We arrived at Pompeii with open skies and nearly 70F (about 20C) weather. It was perfect to tour Pompeii without the summer crowds I must say. No one pushing, no screaming kids, and very little tour guides flying their yellow flags. You could see Napoli and Vesuvius so clearly, if I were a painter, I would be able to paint the trees that were far away in great detail or a family’s clothing hanging on the line to dry (depending on which of Pompeii I was looking).
Later that day, we took the Circumvesuviana (the train that travels from Napoli to Sorrento) to the center of the city (Napoli) to have lunch at my favorite pizzeria, L’antica Pizzeria da Michele. This pizzeria is special for two reasons, (i) it’s where the pizza “Margherita” (tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, and basil), was first created, (ii) if you’ve seen the film Eat, Pray, Love, it’s the restaurant where the actress Julia Roberts ate pizza.
We decided to stroll down the main shopping strip after lunch to find the streets and the shops packed full of shoppers. It was a wonderful feeling seeing the holiday excitement take hold.
The trip was fabulous and we all vowed to return again to the area in the spring to enjoy an entire weekend of fun and a little relaxation which is what I believe you could achieve by just stepping outside of the busy city of Napoli down to Sorrento and in between with breakfast at the bar, a morning walk on the beach followed by lunch at one of the thousands of wonderful restaurants, and an afternoon nap then dinner along the sea shore.