Guns & Butter: Naples Travel Guide

TPOL’s Guns & Butter Travel Guide is the best way to see as much as you can in as little time as possible. Here’s how it works: A trip is composed of two factors: Labor And Lazy. The opportunity cost (what is given up) for relaxing and being Lazy is gained by being adventurous in the form of Labor and vice versa. The guide includes inefficient activities i.e., tourist traps that should be avoided and aspirational activities that are worth doing but may be impossible to see given the constraints of time and resources.

Here is the Guns & Butter Naples, Italy Travel Guide.

I allotted three nights of my Round The Atlantic Tour for Naples, giving me, what I hoped, was enough time to formulate my own opinion about a city I was told to skip. When I travel, I don’t do any homework before I go. The winging approach is part of TPOL’s Travel Philsophy. Most of the time it works out great as I try to squeeze in as much as I can in a short amount of time. Occasionally, it backfires and I’m left annoyed that I didn’t do some planning. (see Don’t Let National Holidays Mess With Your Trip)

My original plan before going to Italy was to use Naples as the home base for exploring Naples and the surrounding areas. This was a mistake. What I should have done is the following:

Day 1

• 10:50PM Stay at Palazzo Caracciolo Napoli to recover from terrible Air France flight and lounge experience.

  

• Late night food: Have dinner at Lombardis. Naples invented the pizza and the margherita with buffalo mozzarella was on point.

  

Day 2

• Early AM: Checkout of the hotel and take the ferry to Capri. (Unresolved: What to do with the luggage when you get to Capri?)
• Monte Solaro or Blue Lagoon: Take your pick, either go to the top and see the beautiful island or take a boat to see the Blue Grotto. I chose Monte Solaro and appreciated the view after the fog dissipated and the sun came out. 
• Drink: Head back down to the port and drink a bottle of house wine while waiting to catch the ferry to Positano.

  

• Stay in Positano.

  

Day 3

• Rent a car in Positano and make your way back to Naples while visiting the sites on your schedule versus a stupid tour of the coast. Personally, I would skip Pompeii because I had no interest.  Also, I would skip the town of Amalfi because it is a terrible tourist trap.

  

  

  

• Stay in Naples.
• Drink at an espresso bar. 
• Find another pizza place. 
• Go to Sicily.