I’ve never felt a particular affinity for the Mediterranean — too hot, not neurotic enough, I suppose — which is why I hadn’t visited Spain until a couple years ago, and my only previous visits to Italy were to Rome and Venice. It’s one of the costs of not traveling that often; when you do travel, you tend to stick to the places you’ve always wanted to see or places you know you’ll like. I’ve been to Rome and Venice twice, in fact, both times on whirlwind two-week tours of Europe. In retrospect this seems like a mistake. Even without looking south there’s a lot I wanted to see (Florence and Milan being near the top of that list) and revisiting places seems like a luxury.

The usual gloss is that Italy becomes more Italian the further south you go. The guidebook I’ve got¹ suggests you should travel down as far as Rome, and see how you like it. If it’s great, keep going. If the heat and the crowds and the traffic and the general attitude is getting to you, maybe head back north. But I finally had an excuse to visit the southern end of the country, so I jumped at the chance.

My first stop in Italy was Matera, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the city is simply breathtaking. It’s been continuously inhabited for 40,000 years² and the residents, rather than construct buildings, simply dug their way into the cliff face. These dwellings are called the Sassi (literally “stones” in Italian). Development of the city proceeded in this kind of way, with cisterns and storehouses and workplaces and sleeping quarters simply being carved deeper and deeper into the rock.

It wasn’t exactly a luxurious lifestyle, and in the 1950s the government forcibly cleared out the Sassi, which mostly didn’t have electricity or running water. They were abandoned for about 30 years, when a new government decided to emphasize tourism, and they’ve since all been converted back over to hotels or B&Bs or restaurants or bars. No telling if the people forced out in the ’50s received adequate restitution, but I can guess.

Whatever the history, the city now is unbelievably gorgeous. It’s a maze of stairs and alleys cascading down the rock face like the terraces of vineyards, with balconies and outcroppings and the occasional shop or restaurant tucked around a corner. I can’t recommend it to anyone who blanches at the idea of hiking up and down 150 or so stairs to get anywhere. But if you can the city is almost endlessly beguiling.

Most of the buildings are located on top of the caves which have been dug into the rock, so you have the frequent experience of walking into a small restaurant and discovering it’s about five times as big as you thought, since there’s three or four deeper spaces all stacked up one on top of the other. The same goes for a lot of places; there’s a modern sculpture museum where much of the display areas are contained within these spaces below ground, while there’s a temporary Salvador Dalí exhibition spread out among two 13^th century monasteries, built into the side of the cliff face.

There’s something of a paradoxical element to the whole thing; these places have been preserved because of tourism. I’m very aware of that. But at the same time, these are still thousands of years old, and they’ve been fashioned and refashioned as needs dictated. Usually when I visit historical places, I’m trying to figure out what’s real: “Is this authentic?” or “How has this been changed?” or “What’s been covered up or altered or misleading?” Here, those questions don’t really apply. You’re seeing glimpses of all of it at once, all the history layered on top of one another, an unbroken line tracing all the way back to when people took shelter in the first caves.

I was in Matera for Trial of the Shadowcasters, a larp set in the city. It was designed as part of Matera’s “Festival n* Stories,” which is itself part of their year as a European Capital of Culture. The idea for the larp itself is can’t miss — people (called “shadowcasters” and possessed with vague magical powers) from different eras of the city (fascists from the ’30s; Franks, Lombards, and Saracens from late antiquity; and ancient Greeks from Archaic Greece) are coming loose in time, and find themselves in the present day having to determine what’s happened and how to work together to prevent a catastrophe.

Trial was a pervasive game, meaning it was designed in and around the city of Matera proper; in the course of playing the game you were expected to wander through the streets, moving from location to location, getting lost in the alleys, meeting and losing others as the game progressed. Pervasive games succeed and fail based on the locations they’re set in, and Matera was a brilliant setting for it. As a shadowcaster, you could use shadows to pose and answer questions, so it felt very meaningful to be wandering out into the dazzlingly bright Italian sun, where everything was blinding or set off by sharp, dark shadows, only to duck back into a cold cave filled with eerie sculptures and colored lights.

Unfortunately, it was a compromised game. The game was designed for around 60 people, and in the end had to run with only about half of that. And even then, a number of roles were filled by locals at the last minute. I’m not privy to the full story of what happened, but it mostly came from the complexities of running a larp in an Italian festival. If you’re running a game that involves international travel, you have to give people enough time to make plans. And there was plenty of time, but the ticket date was announced and then canceled at the last minute, only to finally launch months later. It was a cascading failure. The Italian partners³ took so long to get back on fundamental questions that the ticket price couldn’t be set, which means by the time the tickets were finally on sale most people had already booked their plans for the summer. Lower than expected signups meant some significant redesigns of the game, which further delayed getting characters out to those who had signed up and further cut into the prep time.

This isn’t to say it was a bad game, at all. But you could see, sometimes, what was lost. Characters alluded to who weren’t there, hints of plots that couldn’t really be explored, the sense that there needed to be just a few more roles to really fill out the setting. It’s likely not going to get a chance for a rerun; the access to the spaces was accomplished largely through the festival, and I doubt the organizers have much appetite for navigating Italian bureaucracy again, at least for a while. And that’s a real shame. The game was a lovely design. I wish more people could have seen it.

After Matera I booked a ride to Naples, and I was half-expecting to be stabbed as soon as I stepped off the bus. I had been warned by a friend just the day before about the crime rate — 40% unemployment, muggers sticking guns in the faces of tourists and demanding Rolexes, robbers on Vespas grabbing handbags and dragging women who won’t let go down the street — and the picture painted was so bleak I was vaguely considering cancelling.

As might have been expected, that picture bore precisely zero relation to what I found. Naples is not in the middle of some virulent crime wave. You are not likely to get stabbed or mugged or murdered over your wristwatch. Yes, the city is dirty⁵ and crowded and noisy and bewildering and can sometimes feel scary and is ultimately kind of hard to love. In other words, it’s a lot like New York City.

There is kind of a tragic air to Naples. It’s hard to remember that it was one of the wealthiest and most impressive cities in Europe as recently as the 1850s. And then Garibaldi happened. After Italian unification the treasury of Naples was moved to Rome, and a series of calamities — a crushing recession, massive emigration from the region, heavy bombing during WWII — resulted in the city as it is now. Most of the recent economic development in Italy has been isolated to the north. You can see all the glory that Naples used to have in the museums and the castle and the palaces, all short blocks away from what are still largely run down and crowded apartments.

So the city can feel dangerous. But really, the most dangerous part of the city for me has been the traffic. I’m grateful for the time I lived in NYC, because compared to that, this feels like getting called up to the major leagues. I’ve never lived anywhere else where I was advised to stare drivers directly in the eyes when you step out into traffic. But it works. The streets are a confusing jumble of narrow cobblestones crossing every which way, and you can expect the Neapolitans to be brushing past you on scooters, honking and dodging the pedestrians. But I’ve stood on street corners in Manhattan while a bus at full speed nearly took my nose off and I didn’t flinch. This was nothing.

I’ve been mostly taking it easy. I did a guided day trip to Pompeii on Sunday, a self-guided walking tour of Naples on Saturday, and some jaunts out to the Archeological Museum and the Cathedral of Naples during the week. And, of course, I ate the food. There’s a long, narrow street running through the heart of the city⁶ where you can see from one end of the city to the other. It’s a major tourist hub, and it’s packed with restaurants and cafés and shops and scenic churches and street life. I’ve wandered through there just about every day I’ve been here — hard to miss, since it runs across the whole place — and I usually end up eating on it or nearby.

Naples gets a bad rap for its food, but it is in Italy, so take that with a grain of salt and a pinch of fresh basil. Every place I’ve been to has been good, from the bowl of sauce with bread at Tandem Ragù⁷ to the pay-by-weight buffet at Etto.⁸ And there’s always the pizza. Naples is now the second place I’ve ever been, behind New York City, where I’d generally trust the quality of any random slice shop I passed by. Italy is the kind of place where it’s hard to eat poorly, and it’s easy to eat very, very well.

And I guess that’s what I’ll take from this, really. Pompeii was impressive and sad, the larp was fun, the Antiquities Museum an unceasing parade of marvels. But it’s the time I spent in Madera before and after the game, killing a second bottle of wine, having just finished an impressive array of food, that I’ll really miss. My day trip to Pompeii included a couple stops in towns along the Amalfi Coast, and I had time to sit on the coast with a glass of Limoncello and just stare across the beach at the water and the boats and the waves. And if I could just find a couple friends and a couple weeks I could do nothing but that? Yes, please. More of that.

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Footnotes

¹ Rick Steves, natch.

² Okay, some people argue that it’s been continuously inhabited for 3,000 years, and only sporadically inhabited for 75,000–150,000 years before that.

³ If you really want some fun, spend a couple days watching Scandinavian larp designers with a reputation of being exacting and precise deal with Italian organizational culture.

⁴ It’s really hard to find decent crime statistics online for Italy. You can find a whole lot of people saying they felt very unsafe in Naples, but trying to pin a number on the actual crimes committed is nearly impossible, let alone comparing those numbers to other countries. I can tell you that in 2014 there were 400 homicides in all of Italy. In Chicago alone for that year? 407.

As near as I can tell, the general advice for tourists applies — be careful in crowds, pay attention to your surroundings, don’t flash money or carry too much with you, stick to where people are, don’t drink too much, if you start to feel unsafe head someplace you do — and you’ll be fine.

⁵ Like, really dirty. The worst part about the city is the piles of garbage everywhere. It’s not quite-NYC-garbage-strike bad, but it’s at least halfway there. And they’re not on strike.

Garbage services turns out to be a long-standing issue in Naples. The standard assumption is that they’re all mobbed up so none of the money that goes towards cleaning up really gets there. Various politicians have promised to fix it, and none of them have managed. I’ve no doubt this is one of the reasons Naples has the reputation it does. Tourists don’t really care about corruption or bad government, but piles of garbage on the curb are a first-magnitude crisis.

⁶ In fact the old name for it, Spaccanapoli, literally means “Naples-splitter”

⁷ Scarpetta. It’s a thing.

⁸ Literally, 100 grams