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| Heaven is a place on earth |
My mission: to climb every mountain, aka eat every pizza.
On the train, i was suddenly overcome with this joyful feeling of unfettered, untethered liberation that I hadn’t felt in a long time. There were just rustlings of it when I first made my way to Italy, but some patented blend of melancholia and anxiety did its best to blot out that soaring hopeful feeling that was now taking possession of my chest cavity. Somehow or other fate — with which I’ve had a complicated and borderline antagonistic relationship — finagled a way for me to really and truly live out all my dreams in short succession. Jury is still out on how that worked for my pscyhe, but I’ll be damned if the honeymoon phase of that equation isn’t fucking exhilarating.
I was having all of these thoughts on the train as I pulled out of Florence, only a little sad to say goodbye to beautiful Tuscany, the breathtaking backdrop for some of my hardest interior grappling to date. Just goes to show you can be in the most beautiful place on earth and still be on a major bum out. I sped through the countryside pondering the last week and what lay ahead, jamming to some of the music that has been my soundtrack this last little while in Italy (see: St. Vincent, Mitski, Jamila Woods and Dreezy) and generally engaging a borderline teenager-y, borderline guileless bliss-out.
And then, Naples.
If you’ll recall, dear readers, I wound up here once before, inadvertently, when I boarded my train from Rome and went south instead of north. But with work awaiting me the next day and no lodgings for the night, I beat a fast path outta here. Now, here I was with a clear purpose, all of my intention trained solely and punishingly on Pizza. Because it was a Sunday, a lot of the major players were closed, but I found one of the several recommended by Italian Food Kween Katie Parla, dropped my bags at my hotel and under a banner of blue sky and hot Mediterranean sun began the religious pilgrimage to Pizzeria di Matteo.
Basically everything that I experienced in Naples can be described as carnivalesque, from the scent of fried dough that seems to hang just above the landscape and whoosh through the dark narrow streets to you at a moments notice, to the random ass brass band parade that careened underneath the second floor window of the pizzeria as I sat waiting for my two (YES two) pizza and very large beer to the veritable circus barkers of the Lungomare selling bouquets of balloons and shooting bubbles out of plastic AK-47s. Most everything you will read about Naples will allude to its gritty charm, and yeah, you might well be winding your way through a dark alley studded with human excrement, behind a loose pack of young toughs who decide to casually light a newspaper on fire and throw it behind them towards you so that it floats on the wind and narrowly misses your face and all of a sudden walk out onto a charming open piazza in the shadow of some romantically crumbling building with a palm tree growing through it.
I had a heightened sense of caution about me because of all that I’d read about its rough and tumble nature, not to mention that bullshit that happened to me in Rome and the overall added layer of caution one must abide by as a woman traveling alone. Needless to say, without the impetus of food or drink to propel me forward at nightfall (because I'd taken care of all my bodily needs for the day within the span of about fifteen minutes) I retired to my room at nightfall to chill da fuck out and try to mentally prepare for the next leg of my journey.
But back to the pizza. I was shocked to discover, upon arriving at one of the prestigious but to my mind lesser known pizza haunts, that there was a huge mob (bad choice of words but it stays) of people clustered around the entrance. Having not done thorough research about this place or its internal logic and ettiquette, I simply stood bewildered in the cluster by the alleyway until a young American couple edged their way in behind me with, based upon my eavesropping, a much more informed grasp on the situation. If you just wanted to order “al banco” you could elbow your way to the front of the place’s left hand takeout counter. But I came here for pizza and I’ll be damned if I wasn’t going to sit down and enjoy that shit. So i fought my way to the front and gave the terse looking dude with the notepad my name and said, sheepishly, “solo una,” hoping that they might fight some bar stool to shove me onto right away or take pity on me for being too much of a loser to find anyone to eat pizza with in its native environs.
But no. All told, I waited for about 45 minutes to an hour before I reminded the dude of my existence and was brusquely waved upstairs to a table of four, surely maddening the hungry throngs of fourtops in my midst. While I waited on the street, I was able to take in the spectacle of tourists and natives alike choosing to spend a good chunk of their Sunday crammed into a narrow street for a taste of that sweet sweet goodness. There were punky tweny-something Napolitanos, sullen eleven year olds getting slipped pieces of fried dough from the side door to satiate them while waiting, lipstick linered fifty-year-old women wearing stiletto heels and furs and sweaty drunk Americans (not me this time I promise, that came later) all vying for a spot. I watched as the tattoo’d young pizzaoli slid their paddles into the oven to remove perfectly charred pies and huge stuffed balloons of fried dough. And then my time came and I was led upstairs, stationed cattycorner from the dumbwaiter that issued in pie after pie from the oven downstairs. I ordered the classic marghertia di Bufala (fucking 4.50 euros, fam) AND what I was hoping was one of those puffy fried behemoths stuffed with provolone and tomatoes (staff did not speak a lick of English and there was no one I could point to When Harry Met Sally style and say “I want what she’s having").
And I waited for my REAL LIFE to begin.
And I waited for my REAL LIFE to begin.
I looked around me to watch how the Italians were eating their pizza so that I wouldn't behave like the ravenous wildebeest I felt myself to be inside. Most were doing some combination of using a fork and knife to cut and usher mouthward the thinner, flopper bits and then using hands to fold the sturdier portions and eat them. Intuitive.
My larger than plate-sized pizza arrived and I took a minute to pray to my one true Pizza God before digging in, not even caring if they forgot my other thing, but of course they did not and so soon my table was laden with a massive amount of food and beer and water and phone charger and POSITIVE VIBEOLOGY.
Is it as good as they say? When you’ve been waiting your whole life for it, yeah it is. I have had some very fucking delicious pizza in my day, so perhaps it wasn’t the revelation it might be for someone who hasn’t hollered at a legit wood-fired place in Brooklyn or w/e. But to spare you all the food writer descriptors, I will simply say it was something like a religious experience. After focusing solely on my traditional pie, I cut into my football sized, slightly deflated fried dough jammer (I’m forgetting what this is called because my mind went completely dead when I was in striking distance from my boo). But soon enough I developed a strategy that ensured I’d allocate prime stomach real estate to the main event, the classic, while sampling the fried monster intermittently: I’d consume one palm sized triangle of pizza and then eat one to two bites of Fried Thing. By the time I’d finished the pie, I was about 2/3rds done with Fried, and didn’t feel the least bit like slowly rolling myself into the sea to die, so I went for it. I dominated. I felt alive and energized. I remember Katie saying that the better ingredients a pizzaiolo uses, the more massive the quantity of pizza you can eat without feeling ill. Which is a a pro-tip if I’ve ever heard one.
After paying I wandered out into the streets in search of a postprandial ciggie (sorry mom and dad) and a stroll to the ocean side, and as I walked, the pizza slowly started to take effect and make my pants feel tighter and my tumfum feel more like the expansive whale-like blob it’s always been destined to be. I pressed onward, wondering if this was a testament to di Matteo’s’ ingredients or just a sign of aging and losing my pizza edge.
The remainder of the day I ambled, too museumed-out from a week with the parents to subject myself to any entrance fees or indoor wanderings and placard readings and content simply to take in the weird, jostling, seedy, decrepit beauty of it all.
Today I leave for Rome for ONE NIGHT ONLY (not before hollering at the king of Naplitano pizza, Sorbillo) and tomorrow I will leave Italy for good (for now). I’m ready. This country is a beautiful, romantic, infuriating casino. But Gitsy wants to go home.
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