Contrary to American museums, historical places, or National Parks, Italy (maybe all of Europe) provides you with nothing when you enter their tourist areas. As you walk up you'll be looking for biglietti to pay for your entrance or to buy your tickets. After that, you may get a "Starts over there opposite side of courtyard" but no map, no guidebook, no "this is what you're going to see", no "Here is Paulo, he'll be your guide for the next 60 glorious minutes". He just said start in the courtyard. Where to go?
We wandered around misinterpretting his instructions and ended up in the administrative offices applying for a job!
Then we found the correct area and we explored the architecture of the Castle, ignoring somewhat the art they had inadvertently placed on the walls covering up what we wanted to see. "What's behind this drape?" "Ohhh, another view of the water."
And since it's always time for another meal we ended up having more Margherita Pizza at a cool building next door. I think the building is what drew the visitors in here because there didn't seem like much shopping going on.
On our way to the Castle "tour" this morning we stopped by a place that had restored its theatre recently. They offered tours. We convinced the guy to do one of the tours in English (which they do, he was just reluctant to do one it seemed). It was across the street from our lunch stop so we headed on over. There was a gang of 40 Italians waiting to get in and do the tour. 20 walked away when learning the tour was in English. I think there were 4 of us who spoke English as our first language. We felt bad, but not really.
The theatre and the restoration were beautifully done.
These mirrors in each of the upper booths was so that the King could see the beautiful dresses that the ladies were wearing.
Next was a Rick Steves' walk through town that ended up close to our next eatery - another pizza place. There was an old church, another old church, a Disney Store (that Rick failed to mention!) shopping through street vendors, gelato, and finally pizza.
They do like colors. We found these in a kitchen store.
Woohoo! Another Disney Store that might have city-specific items for us to buy.
A pizza that we would NOT be buying...
On the walk back to our motel we chose the waterfront not realizing it had very little shopping places (very odd) and no views of the water. It was like walking along the container dock area in Seattle but it was in the center of their downtown. Their ferry boats were down here also. Our intent in the morning was to take a high-speed ferry across the water to Sorrento, so we walked up to the ticket window and made sure we knew when the ferry was leaving and how much it was going to cost.
We walked back along the route to our hotel to see if it was feasible to drag our lugguge along in the morning but we decided the cobblestones were too numerous for our luggage wheels and we opted to take a taxi in the morning.
The waterfront in front of our hotel was relatively nice, clean, and traffic-free. Oddly it was not packed with people.
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