Where Did The Fat Sisters Go? (Italian edition)

OR: “What's the vibe?”

The holiday is over now. Or, it has been for some time, and we just lost momentum with posting newsletters. The Fat Sisters are empty. Packed away for a well-deserved rest, under the bed until they are next called upon to adventure. In three weeks, they travelled 1,414 kilometres (we’re European now) through three countries and stayed in a dozen rooms. Hostels, hotel rooms, dog prisons, the summer home of a dead dictator, a log cabin, and on one occasion, a hotel room that appeared to be modelled on the chamber of a Venetian courtesan. We did a lot. We saw a lot. We recorded podcasts that some of you were kind enough to listen to. You made us feel like travel journalists, which is more or less a job that died with AA Gill, and we thank you for that. 

We actually talked a lot about travel journalism on our trip, and how useful it would have been if good travel journalism was still widely available and non-paywalled. When you’re stumbling blind into a town you’ve never heard of because you have three hours to burn until your next train, you are inevitably going to Google “things to do in X”.

The results you will get, regardless of where you are, will be this: 

• Twenty-eight Google reviews declaring a specific restaurant to have either the best or the worst pizza they have ever eaten. 

• A Wikipedia article stating “X is the second largest city in the Sponge Region, and features one of the first entirely sponge-carved cathedrals on the Adriatic coast” (the sponge cathedral is currently closed to visitors)

• The blog of a very pretty American girl who once enthusiastically visited a bridge

Even when a place had a reasonable amount of information available about it, we would still stare at our phones, wondering if we should go, murmuring “yes, but what’s the vibe?”

We are a generation largely preoccupied with vibes and it’s time we stopped apologising for that. It’s not enough to have restaurants or bars or a famous corn maze. What’s the vibe???? Are the people generally cool? And if they’re not cool, are they nice? Are the bookshops more WH Smith or more Foyles? Are the pastries dense or light? Is it a beer town or a wine town? Are they into music in a sad way (lone acoustic guitarist singing Lady in Red while you eat dinner) or a fun way (fifteen old guys smoking and playing miscellaneous instruments together outside a bar at midnight)? 

Someone needs to start a travel website called What’s The Vibe? for the communication of vibes that is neither racist, xenophobic, colonial, classist, pervy, fetishistic, or weird. We are a generation who travel a lot and we deserve to know what the vibes are. Jen and I are busy and we can’t start the website, but maybe you can start it and pay us a salary.

Below we have attempted to grind down our recommendations and experiences into our reading of The Vibe. We are prepared to be, and probably are, wrong. These are mere impressionistic stances taken from brief visits, some of which were a few days, some only a few hours. 

We have lots to say about the vibe, so this week it’s Italy, a well known vibe globally, but home to various micro-vibes that we have a lot to say about. Slovenian and Croatian vibes will follow presently.

Naples

The best way to imagine being Naples is to imagine what it might feel like to be inside an accordion while somebody is playing it. Naples is noisy and confusing; Naples is full of strange and unlikely corners that seem to shift at different times of day and night. Naples smells of farts (from the volcano) and laundry (because it hangs everywhere) and the petrol fumes of the thousand tiny mopeds hooning around its tiny narrow streets. It is beautiful and chaotic and you will never know when you’re about to turn a corner and find a man playing the keyboard out of a balcony, dangling a bucket for tips, while the people on the street below have a dance party. Naples is the only place we had to have a ‘spirited debate’ with a taxi driver for trying to grift us out of 30 Euro for a 1 mile trip (he didn’t succeed, and the experience was invigorating). It’s also the only place we managed to eat an extraordinary three course lunch with wine for about 20 Euro each. If you are with a pal and you want to feel like you’re really getting into the spirit of travelling, Naples is the place for you. If you are looking for a quiet romantic weekend getaway… maybe not.

OUR TIP: The thing that’s so wonderful about this city is the high contrast of experiences you get there. You can be in the busiest street in the world one moment, and then in the quietest, most exquisitely ornate church the next. We spent an hour or so in the Santa Chiara monastery, on a hot afternoon where both of us were rapidly losing the energy to fight through the bustle of a thousand people. It’s got a majolica cloister which may or may not be famous, but was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Sitting in there, I could almost understand why people would choose to retreat from the world into the church. I lost my sunglasses in this cloister, and the only conclusion I can draw is that the monastic life appealed to them and they left me to become men of the cloth. I wish them well in their new life.

Pompeii

It feels almost wrong to ask what’s the vibe about a literal ghost town, but we’re doing it anywhere. The thing nobody will tell you about the archaeological site of Pompeii is this: the ruins of Pompeii are a literal actual city. They are easily the size of a small town. When you think about it for about two seconds, this makes perfect sense, because of course before Vesuvius erupted… Pompeii was a city. It still is, it’s just that now it’s a city with no roofs, no inhabitants, and almost nowhere to buy an orange soda and a sandwich, or have a piss. It is, as you would expect, extraordinary and strange and haunting and full of plaster casts of dead bodies that get their own little icon on the signage. It is also large and hot and tiring. It does not even slightly have the vibe of National Trust property, or a stately home, or Chedworth Roman Villa. There are no bibbed tour guides to help you or to tell you to keep your hands off the merchandise. You can do basically whatever you want in Pompeii, and only your respect for the dead will stop you.

Pompeii kind of has the vibe of the labyrinth in Piranesi. It also kind of has the vibe of half-remembered school trips in the early nineties, before Instagram tourism was a thing. We loved it. 

OUR TIP: Three top tips for you today, the first of which is something we did, and the second and third of which are things we learnt the hard way. One: don’t get a bus tour to Pompeii, get the train from Naples. It’s about 6 euro return and it goes from a slightly hidden platform underground and at the back of the station, which is vaguely signposted as ‘Vesuvio Circulare’ or something. You must line up to buy tickets at the booth, and then you cram onto an old tin can which coughs you out right by the entrance to the archeological site. Two: buy your tickets for the site and download the app guide before you travel, because there’s limited mobile reception and you really need to have a sense of what you want to see before you go (Pompeii brothel? Pompeii pub? Pompeii fresco? Pompeii amphitheatre?) because, as we’ve mentioned, it’s massive. Thirdly, bring a packed lunch because there is only one extremely well-hidden cafe and the queue to buy things from it is, unsurprisingly, about a mile long. 

Sorrento 

From what I can tell the real test to see if a place is in the firmament of untouchably glamorous, firmly cool, almost-nobody-can-actually-live here tourism wealth is if they have gone really big on one extremely benign local item. A bun from Copenhagen. An envelope from Florence. And: a lemon from Sorrento. Everywhere you go in Sorrento there are either lemons or pictures of lemons. We each bought fans with lemons on them and every time we re-packed the Fat Sisters we would sort of sigh when the fan had to go in, because they are so stupid, these fans, and so useless, and we had such limited carrying space. Every time we would consider leaving them; every time we brought them with us. I am looking at mine right now, on my dining table. I can’t throw it away - it’s my Sorrento fan! This is the magic and power of Sorrento. It’s so beautiful and so hard to access – both financially and physically – that it can and must boil down its appeal to silly items that the non-rich can buy in order to feel they belong there. Hence: the lemons. 

OUR TIP: spend the morning in Pompeii and then take the train to Sorrento for a big lunch and a seaside walk. Do NOT get a cocktail at the Pergola. They have the best view but they are not doing good things with it. They tuck their bar in a hedge and blast you with pretentious expensive drinks that all taste like Fanta, as if somehow that is better than simply looking at Sorrento. 

Florence

If Naples is like living inside an accordion, then Florence is like having coffee while perched on the chestnut body of a violin. Florence is a city where people have been going to make lovely things, buy lovely things or manage lovely things, for hundreds of years. Every tile and flagstone and doorway is heaving with effort and meaning, and for that reason, we established the Wonder Bar. Sometimes your Wonder Bar gets too full, in Florence. There’s only so much awe available to you in a given day. You know what Florence is missing? A pinball arcade. A comic book shop. A CEX. (I’m not sure if Florence is literally missing these things; but the vibe communicates that these things don’t exist. And this is “What’s the Vibe?”, not Google Maps.) 

I would have loved to seen just one troupe of teenage goths spraying Italian graffiti onto a Medici landmark. Some Florence locals we drank with more of less co-signed this: there is not much of a counter-culture going in Florence because the capital-C Culture is so all-encompassing that it’s hard to imagine what the counter-culture would even be. It’s the reverse of Naples: perfect for romance and connection, not so perfect if you want to, get a little sloppy and fight with a cab driver.

OUR TIP: Florence is a busy place and it’s basically always heaving with tourists. It’s easy to get overwhelmed or to feel like you have to see everything. My tip would be to only do a few things, but do them well, and slowly. We spent a whole afternoon slowly meandering toward the Piazzale Michelangelo (famously the best view in Florence) stopping off for snacks and wine-from-a-wall and a very specific parfumerie where the woman told me I had a “great nose” and for that reason, I spent €75 in her crazy shop. We spent a morning at a yoga class under the Medici chapel, and it was so beautiful I almost cried, and the instructor sat on Jen’s back. Don’t try to squeeze in every art gallery or religious relic. They do not matter, not really. Do fewer things, better. They spent a long time building Florence, so you should spend a long time enjoying it. 

Oh, and also: stay at the Re-Dama Hostel. It’s two tram stops from the city centre and has everything you need. Do not bankrupt yourself by staying in the city, because the trams really are excellent and go every five minuets.

Sirmione 

According to the internet, this town is known as ‘The Pearl of Lake Garda’ and, from what we can tell, it lives up to this epithet. I say “from what we can tell” because our time in Sirmione was spent only in the very tip of the peninsula in the old town / castello. We know nothing of the vibe of Sirmione beyond the castle walls, but the vibe within them is: the gentlest Disneyland for tired girls. There are shaded grotto beaches where you can rent a sun lounger and drink Aperol Spritz. There’s a small mediaeval church, behind which there’s a park where about twenty beautiful and strangely pastel-coloured cats live. There are a variety of shops selling glass trinkets and fridge magnets; a lot of restaurants ranging from Very Fancy right down to Here’s Your Filled Flatbread; and a wide variety of well-behaved and slightly tame birds. The walk from the castello up to the northernmost part of Sirmione - where the grotto beach is - is about fifteen minutes up an extremely small hill, but if that miniature exertion feels beyond you there’s one of those little trolley trains which will take you there for a couple of euros. There are thermal hot springs and therefore spas, but there’s also just the lake: it’s cold and it’ll turn your nail varnish yellow because there’s sulphur in the water, but it will be worth it because when you swim in it you’ll feel like you’re being reincarnated into a better version of yourself. 

OUR TIP: If you have not listened to our Grand Budapest Hotel episode, you may have missed us waxing lyrical about the Hotel Giardino. Please permit me to do so again. This hotel has been around for almost a hundred years, it’s family owned, it seems to have last been decorated in the 1970s and then just lovingly upkept ever since. There is nothing especially cool or bougie about this hotel; the staff seem constantly baffled by the fact of having guests; and the breakfast setup is, frankly, unhinged. But it’s on the banks of the lake with its own private jetty for swimming from and, as the name suggests, a lovely shaded garden. It is clean and inexpensive and somehow the most comfortable and lovely place in the world. Stay here.

Trieste

If I was looking for a city to play the part of Generic European City in a film, then Trieste would be my go-to gal. Trieste exists in an almost perfect state of characterless anonymity. It looks a bit Italian, but also a bit Austrian, but also a bit like it’s part of the Balkans, and with a weird touch of the French, and that’s because it’s in a part of the world that has been claimed by so many different countries, dynasties, and regimes over its long existence. Its vibe is the Taylor Swift lyric, “I’m a mirrorball, I can change everything about me to fit in.” You can get probably any food you like here and it would be: fine. The people don’t seem to be doing a bit or anything, they’re just living there, being Triestians. Perhaps they commute to Vienna? I don’t know. You can see perfectly adequate examples of most European architecture here. It is unremarkable, but inoffensively so. It’s just a city that doesn’t really know who or what it is, or how it likes its eggs to be cooked. One day, perhaps, this city will be forced into discovering its true self, Eat Pray Love style - but for now, it’s happily avoiding thinking about that, thank you very much. 

OUR TIP: I actually don’t think we have a useful tip for you. If you’ve got to go to Trieste, then you’ve got to go to Trieste, I guess. They have some pretty good pastries.

Next time: Slovenia! If we remember! We might not!