Saturday 23rd - Bari, Naples, Grumento Nova

Up before our alarm at 7am after a pretty good sleep. Managed to get a carton of milk from a mini-market at 7.30am, ate our muesli, and off to find the bus-stop. Stumbled across a ticket agent while we were exploring and managed to buy our 2 tickets, plus get directions to the bus-stop, which seems to be a curse to find according to internet comments. Hung around for half an hour, streets full of litter but no-one seems to notice. So many people smoking that we had trouble trying to stand upwind. We have really found the smoking a curse – for some reason the flavour of Croat and Italian smoke is more noxious than Malaysian.

Naples - yuk!

The three hour bus trip was no bother, into Naples Central. We cannot believe the filth of Naples. I remember they had a series of rubbish strikes some years ago, but it appears they are still on strike as there are enormous piles of stinking rubbish everywhere. The streets are simply swimming in litter. Perhaps it has got to the point where locals simply drop anything anywhere as it won’t make a scrap of difference.

We decided to sort our ferry tickets first as these are hard to source, so dragged our bags down to the port where we got tickets sorted OK. A fair bit of trouble finding a hire car, not aided by the 1-3pm siesta or by it being Easter. We had to backtrack to the port before we could source one – a lovely little Fiat Panda. Knowing Italian hill roads, we were glad to get the smallest car available. Out on the motorway towards more immigrant towns, this time Grumento Nova and Viggiano. Enjoyed the drive to Grumento Nova, with a stop to get supplies in case Easter means closed stores. At GN we soon asked our way to the sole accommodation, an albergo, where the room was both pleasant and very reasonable. We had been a bit concerned about our chances, it being Good Friday and the Italians being out and about for the long break (their ANZAC day equivalent falling on Monday) but it worked out well.

Foreigners are clearly very rare in GN. We were on the receiving end of a lot of careful and prolonged scrutiny in the little town. We are doing a lot of comparing of towns to Liguria where we were several years ago, and GN was noticeably brighter and more open than Ceriana though the latter is probably about as tight as any hilltown can ever get.

Easter decorations in Grumento Nova chapel

We have found the locals superbly helpful and friendly. We went into the local bar/pizzeria/café/meetingplace, pastryshop/TV lounge which was packed with a range of ages from uni students to retirees. I asked the barman about the Vitetta brothers who left from here for Nelson in the 1890s, and after a number of helpers was passed to a young man who took me up the road to where two live Vitetta brothers live, and spent a few minutes being introduced to one, though not with much success. It’s not the first time somebody has taken time out to walk with us somewhere to knock on a door and find somebody we have been looking for, and it is done so cheerfully.

We are finding the book-related places nothing like what we have been expecting. They have generally been much bigger and socially more healthy and vital, clearly a total change from when the emigrants left, when living there was so difficult. Grumento Nova is clearly in good shape, though we expect that a lot of the youth we saw were home from uni or the city for Easter with family. The bar was just buzzing, and it was nice to see young people going in and taking time to shake hands with men from older generations whom they knew.