Napoli, Day One

 2 June 2025

The arrival

The plane left Athens at 10:25 a.m.—or was meant to. It lingered on the tarmac for nearly half an hour, as if Naples herself was in no rush to receive us. We flew over the Ionian, then the Adriatic, then over the green spine of Italy—mountains folding into one another like an old map refolding itself.

Naples. Aeroporto di Napoli-Capodichino. A name with the weight of opera.

My driver waited quietly and took me into the pulsing center of the city. Past shrines tucked into street corners, the scent of frying dough and exhaust, voices rising like birds. I was dropped at Piazza Toledo, in front of the BNL building, and from there I walked.

Every step toward our meeting point beat louder than the last. Not from nerves, but from longing. Seven days stretched before me like an open page.

The nest

The hotel was perched at the top floor of an old building. One of those Neapolitan beauties with secrets in its bones. To reach it, an old metal elevator—the kind that looks like a museum exhibit—swallowed 20 cents per ride, groaning upward like a stubborn god.

The ceiling above the bed held an attic window that stared straight into the Neapolitan sky. It didn’t just frame the heavens. It promised something: freedom, maybe. A new cycle. Something beginning, even if I didn’t know what name to give it yet.

The surface

We wandered through the city like new arrivals in a world that already knew us. We walked to Galleria Umberto I, the grand arcade near the San Carlo Theatre. A marvel of glass and iron, built between 1887 and 1890, its soaring dome a triumph of Renaissance Revival architecture, tinged with the floral whimsy of Art Nouveau.

Named after King Umberto I, the Galleria was built as a symbol of rebirth after a cholera epidemic—a place where light and commerce could banish darkness and decay.

And even now, stepping inside it feels like entering another world—one made of lace and marble, shadow and gold.

From there, the descent.

Lunch before the underworld. A caprese that redefined the word. Mozzarella di bufala, thick and tender like the moon itself, tomatoes bursting with July even in June. Sourdough bread that cracked at the edges like it held secrets. A baba au rhum and chocolate that dripped time and temptation.

Napoli Sotterranea.

The underworld

Forty meters below the surface, through the strata of time, we followed a guide who seemed less like a person and more like a medium—part historian, part shaman. He spoke of Greeks who once mined the soft volcanic tufa to build Neapolis, and of Romans who turned the voids into aqueducts. Water had once flowed here, clean and cold, carried by the hands of the pucho, anonymous workers with a sacred task: to bring water to the homes above.

During the war, the voids became shelter. Bombs fell. More bombs fell. No city in Italy, they say, was hit more than Napoli. Down in the dark, people drew on the walls—women with soft faces and victory curls, Hitler’s grotesque sneer, U-boats turned inside out.

But the strange thing was—it didn’t feel foreign.

The narrow corridors didn’t induce fear. They sparked a kind of playful recognition. My body knew how to move through the passage before I even thought about it. Like I’d been there before.

Memory, I’m beginning to believe, doesn’t belong to time.

The evening

Dinner at Pizzaioli Stanza di Maradona. A temple disguised as a pizzeria. The room was full of faces and icons—some saints, some strikers—and the pizza was everything it needed to be. Maybe not the best in Napoli by guidebook standards, but far better than any I’ve had before.

Later, the music of Passione followed me like a ghost—Riccardo, Avitabile, the chorus of voices that belong to the soul of this city. And somewhere between night and dawn, between a breath and a name, I became part of something I had not known I was missing. Sheets tangled. Words whispered. The city outside continued to pulse and laugh and mourn, but I was wrapped in something else entirely.

And then, silence.

The ritual

Sometime deep into the night, I rose. The attic window spilled silver across the bed.

And in that moonlight, something changed. Or rather, something returned.

I was a priestess. The bed, our altar. The ritual—eternal. It didn’t feel like passion. It felt like remembrance. Like something we’ve done for centuries, over and over, across lifetimes. Our bodies knew long before our minds remembered.

Napoli knows.

And slowly, I am remembering too.