Miss Meliss does Roma and Naples

We moved over here imploring friends to come and visit, and no sooner had we settled into the new flat (we moved in a taxi, so it was hardly the most testing of removals) than our first houseguest arrived!

Meliss had spent several weeks seeing family in Malta and stopped in Rome on the way back to Melbourne. We introduced her to the delights of the cafe that does 10 euro dinners (bruschetta, pizza or pasta, plus a beer or wine, and a coffee - bargain!) and 'litro mojito' (which Ants has renamed 'sneaky mojito' for the fact that you can have 2 or 3 of these and feel fine, until it sneaks up on you when you stand up....).

Ants has, I think, enjoyed having someone else new to explore Rome with, and the two of them make a hilarious pair - she's quite little, and Ants, erm, isn't!

Best of all, this weekend we hopped a train down to Naples - for the bargain price of 23 euros return - to check out Pompeii. Our morning got off to a hilarious start - two american students hopped on board at the last minute, mumbling something about 'changing trains at the next stop'. We didn't have the heart to tell them that the next stop was Naples, in 2 hours time :-) The look on their faces when the guard told them was priceless.

We'd heard some dodgy things about Naples, and I think Meliss and I were both glad to be travelling with an Anthony. We've all now heard stories about people who brazenly gas your compartment to knock out the occupants and pinch all your stuff. And about the rampant petty crime around the station. So by the time we arrived in Napoli, we were pretty well paranoid.

We needn't have worried. Yes, the station district is seedy - welcome to rail travel the world over. But our B&B was spotless - sumptuous even, specially given that we were only paying 18 euros each for the room and brekkie! And I'm sure even the main streets of Naples could be intimidating by night - they're narrow and shut in on either side by looming buildings, and gloomy even by day. (Yes, that's a 'main' street below!)And there were signs everywhere of slightly dodgy dealings - hot cigarettes being hocked on every corner, even occasionally people exchanging embraces and small wads of cash. This is Camorra territory good and proper, but if you kept your nose clean and your eyes averted, it was no problem.

Besides, there was too much else to see. Naples is a poorer city than her cousins further north - Campania is rocky volcanic soil and barren compared to the lush green I remember around Milan. But she holds more than a few treasures. The old town gates were built in the 15th century by the rulers of the day - the Spanish - and the region's profound catholicism was evident in the soaring churches on almost every city block.

But Naples is also gritty and modern and edgy. We loved the modern art and stencil work, and a particularly poignant statement about McDonalds - there's not a Golden arches left in the whole city, apparently. (Huzzah!)

The cafe we stopped at for lunch was beside the ruins of the old town wall, built by the greeks some 2500 years ago and built over by the romans.

After a good feed and plenty o'meandering, we finally found the main museum, where all the best mosaics from Pompeii and Herculaneum have been dug up and 'saved'... hmmm. It seems 19thC Italians were as misguided as their Victorian -era counterparts in England. Never mind. They were amazing.

So was the 'secret room' of naughty relics: erotica deemed so controversial that about 200 years ago some duke ordered it all locked up so that unsuspecting innocents couldn't accidentally be horrified. It's only open for a couple of hours each day, but we made sure we got in on time. Probably more 'hilarious' than erotic, in my humble opinion.

But the bit that took my breath away were the statues from antiquity - the battered Roman-era marble busts you see in books give you no idea of the precision and flowing form of these free standing statues. And to think that, after the Romans, western Europe would wait 1500 years before anything like it emerged again. (Ants, of course, was overawed - and a bit relieved - by the tiny willies on all the statues. Surely Rome wasn't that cold back in the day!)

Thank heavens those 'infidels', the Saracens, Muslims and Moors, preserved all the knowledge that Europeans let lapse - or even deemed dangerous! Humanity owes them much, and many in 'the west' would do well to remember it.