Beachy Head

Beachy Head, in this weather, does nothing to unseat the exploding Anglophilia in Julie and I. In fact, after a stressful few days in the hustle and the heat, the sun and breeze over these white cliffs breathe renewed idealism. Not only do we love the people, the literature, and the history, but the weather’s great, too!

“It’s always like this,” our innkeeper winks. Clearly it is, because only about 30% of the people on the beach own bathing suits.

Eastbourne is a seaside town that looks a lot like Brighton, but where Brighton bears many old remnants of its royal resort days and much more recent remnants of an overactive twenty-something nightlife, Eastbourne seems like a place one could actually live. In fact, that sounds rather tempting (see paragraph 1). The owners of our B&B tell us about their previous life in London, commuting an hour and a half to work. Once their son was born, and they saw him for approximately thirty minutes a day, they decided to pull chocks and move south. That was three years ago.

“This is the sunniest place in England,” he says, the same wink telling us that doesn’t actually mean much, “and it’s a great place to raise a family.” He’d answered the door when we arrived carrying his two-year-old daughter. They have a play area out back and keep their little bikes in the breakfast/common room. If you’re a parent looking for a hotel north of the equator and west of Vladivostok, stay here.

He urges us to hit the beach, the pier, the bike trails, the hiking trails, seven or ten of his favorite restaurants, and waxes poetic about the light over the Downs in the evening. We want to do it all. We’re here for the next fifteen hours.

The beaches in Brighton and Eastbourne are stony, which suits Aryn okay once her feet get used to the uncomfortable feeling of gravel shifting beneath her. Best part about stony beaches? An endless supply of rocks to throw into the waves. Can you hit France, Aryn? The water is icy, freezes our knees, and yet we see a handful of intrepid bathers floating out there. Only mad dogs and Englishmen go outside at noon in Arizona, and only mad Englishmen swim the Channel in May. Aryn, time to go. Aryn… Aryn! Time to go. Aryn. One more rock. Okay, let’s go.

We stroll the pier and the waterfront for a bit, content in the sun, the genial crowd, the hazy view of France, the characters that seems to be on every beach. Soon the sun begins to drift toward the Downs, and we set off in search of white cliffs.

What with the sickness, the traffic, lack of sleep, the worry about the sickness and lack of sleep, and so on, this trip up to now was good but tough. One of those glad-we-went-but trips where the memory maybe serves better than the actual moment. As we crest the first Down, however, that all fades.

We stare with wide eyes, breathing in one of the most beautiful views I have ever seen.

Our innkeeper was too prosaic. We’re all of us, every one (and I’m standing in England now, mind you), too prosaic to do justice to these cliffs, these fields, this sunlight. Especially this sunlight. But one has to try.

Imagine, if you will, a stretch of the purest green fields, waves of breeze blowing across them right up to the edge of the world, which drops away with no warning and no safety gate. Viewed at an angle, with the sun to your back, you see the white cliffs bulging out beneath the grass, a glow the colour of queen Jadis’ cheek and no warmer rising from the chalk to contend with the tenderest of sunsets. On your hands and knees you peer over the edge, because you can, and the blue waves churn chalky dust a hundred metres off shore. Just past the chalk line, in the pure blue of the Channel, a sailboat sits, content that it, not you, has the best view.

I could walk here forever. Julie and I make plans to do just that, in fact, with a tentative date set twelve years hence. A steady stream of travelers has the same idea, yet the Downs are far from crowded. I hear Russian, French, German, several incarnations of English. Asian tourists roll by in buses, enroute to or from what must be a more scenic bluff, a better lighthouse, softer grass. I can’t imagine such a place. I’m lighter than air, and this air is the lightest. Maybe it’s the unexpectedness, the fact that we came here tired, not expecting such splendour, but I’m willing to say that the Beachy Head cliffs in this eternal sunset are in the top two or three most beautiful places I’ve ever been.

So Julie and I continue to grow into unabashed Anglophiles. Nearly all of my fictional friends were born here: Gandalf and the Hobbits, Aslan and Shasta and Puddleglum, Holmes and Watson, Harry and Ron and Hermione, Jeeves and Wooster, Aubrey and Maturin, Sebastian Flyte and Charles Rider, Arthur and Lancelot, Hal and Falstaff, Scrooge and Tiny Tim, Bond, Copperfield, Miss Bennet, even Peeta. And on and on. The fascination grows as my interest in history expands beyond the more famous monarchs: Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Victoria. Kipling and the literature of empire especially appeal to me now, as I act the master in a foreign land. Eliot, my favorite poet, wasn’t born here but got here as fast as he could. London's mid-May romp two years ago was, like Beachy Head, fortuitously timed to surprise and delight. Ought I to embrace it, Nelson’s pole pointed unashamedly at the heavens, last year’s random riots of unknown origin? Weather no one dares speak well of 11 months a year? This evening, in the glow, sitting on soft dry grass atop a chalky cliff, I think I will.

If you need us, we’ll be swimming in tidal pools below the gleaming chalk like the retired Sherlock Holmes. We’ll be strolling up and down the South Downs way like a thousand thousand walkers young and old. You’ll find us at the Beachy Head hotel, sipping golden ale in a perfect sunset with a mushroom pie and berries and cream. We’ll be inside, reading old or newish British lit and denying the rain, like our British seatmates do when our plan lands back in a chilly and sodden Naples.

Bath

We went to Bath as a pilgrimage. Mentioned in a number of works of literature, Bath plays probably its most prominent role in several Jane Austen novels. Julie’s a Jane Austen fan. I like Jane Austen, but Julie’s got the bug, has read all her books (including, on this trip, finishing Lady Susan in the bath, in Bath), has read her biography, read and watched Being Jane, watched the Jane Austen Book Club. Netflix has been great about getting us some of the masterpiece theater productions. It’s clearly a testament to Austen’s wide, enduring appeal that there is so much material to consume based on her novels. We mix with other pilgrims at the Jane Austen center on Gay St., the house a few steps from where she lived.

The center of Bath is small enough for Aryn to walk it, although we regret not bringing a stroller she can use shortly after the second consecutive day of 80+ degree cloudless heat dawns. British-made thermometers don’t go that high. Brits see that kind of heat as often as Neapolitans see snow. I’d observed before how when the sun comes out in England there’s a nonstop party on the lawn. Take that party to the streets—that is, the roadways between Brighton and Bath—and you nearly triple a two and a half hour trip and arrive hot, irritated, and exhausted to a south-facing hotel room on a sunny street below the Royal Crescent. Add no A/C or airflow through that room (which was pretty nice, actually—found it on www.visitbath.co.uk), and you wake up still hot but now worried about the health of your two ill-sleeping children.

Note to parents travelling in Bath: down the hill from the Royal Crescent and to the right is the largest playground ever, with jungle gyms of all shapes and sizes, a merry-go-round, and a skatepark. Also nearby: wide open fields, wooded walkways, botanical gardens, fire pits, and probably some other stuff we didn’t see. This message will self-destruct in five seconds.

So we roll into the Jane Austen museum after eating breakfast with about twenty girls on a bachelorette weekend, Analee in the front-pack and Aryn walking. Aryn does well, digs the period costumes and the tea sets and the little biographical video (which gave her a great seating area to color—sorry, colour—on). The girls try on hats and capes, I read about naval action off of Minorca in the foreign column of a newspaper on display, and homage is paid. The temperature rises, and so does Aryn’s. Analee naps a little.

On the way out, smiling, we notice a sign seeking a part-time guide at the museum. Julie’s non-maternal career ambitions have just gone from dauntingly vague to impossibly specific.

The main attraction in Bath is, of course, the bath. The Romans “discovered” the hot springs here (in the way, say, that Columbus discovered America) and constructed a spa surrounding the reputed healing waters. After the Romans, the baths were neglected for a time until Queen Victoria bathed here and was reputedly cured of her infertility. The rest, as they say, was history.

The audio guide gives you an option for the regular narration, some comments by the one and only Bill Bryson, and a kid’s version. Aryn gets a huge kick out of the kid’s version and loves being able to punch in the numbers at each stop. “Which number is next, daddy?” Lots of people are touching the warm water, but when Aryn does, a staff member comes up and warn us of the multitude of diseases that thrive in the open-air pool. Awesome, we think, and her with a fever already. Purell. Maybe a fifty-pence sip of the (clean) healing waters in the pump room will help? Mmm. Coppery.

Any reader of Austen will be well aware of the town’s reputation as a destination of sorts for pleasure seekers, those who use the baths as an excuse to come, see, and be seen. Combine that with the general British need to party when sun the doth shine, and you’ll get a sense of the atmosphere here. The front five rows at the street performance are, by the performers’ design, college girls. Swarms of their female classmates, bachelorettes, the bachelor parties somewhat creepily shadowing them, the odd tour group, middle-age couples just having a good time. Would her satirical eye look as scornfully on these twittering masses as on her own peers?

The Jane Austen center’s tea room barely gets us in, and turns away the twenty or so people behind us. Analee is the center of attention, and plays with (i.e. drops on the floor) about fifty of their shiniest spoons. Aryn sips her mint tea once, twice, and her feverish eyes roll back into her head. She’s down for the count. “Let her sleep,” says Julie, “my cucumber sandwiches just arrived.” We’re enjoying the tea party alongside a thin, lone girl with a book and a fancy dress. She eats her cake, reads a bit, sneaks a glance at Analee. She folds up her book and leaves, silent. I can’t tell if she’s sadly or splendidly alone, but I suspect the latter.

 When ordering our dessert that night at the bar, Analee meets a bachelor party. I relay a story to the bartender about how I once saw a mom set her baby on the bar late at night, and how sternly I judged her. Analee, from her seat on the bar, reaches out to try to pull that huge lever that would pour me a delicious local hard cider. The bachelor party pulls the groom-to-be away from someone so pure and wholesome. He has time for that kind of thing tomorrow, they say.

Bath meets our pilgrim’s expectations, although we run out of children’s Advil and spend large portions of time lying about in a hot room, resting and allowing the children to rest. Aryn’s cough keeps everyone awake, and the heat further drains. The sun is up at like four, and it’s pretty restless from then on. The sun doesn’t set ‘til like eleven, so it’s restless until then. We hardly expected this kind of warmth (predictions aligned with the yearly average in the 60s), and didn’t pack for it. The Brits never need A/C, and the previous occupants of our room actually battled 40s and 50s weather only a week before. Hard to fault the UK for having better weather than Naples. Anyways, all that merely to illustrate a day in the life of traveling parents. It’s totally awesome, and totally hard. Bring it.

 Less traffic on the way to Beachy Head, even though the sun still blazes and the vintage cars are still out in force. And the convenience store along the highway sells kids’ ibuprofen in individual packets. Also Krispy Kreme donuts. God save the Queen!

Orvieto Winetasting

I’d been bemoaning my lack of involvement with wine, given my unprecedented proximity to some of the finest wineries in the world, and resolved that in 2011 I’d go wine tasting, preferably multiple times in various parts of Italy. Our wine shops here stock a good selection from many Italian regions, so this minor initiative began in moderate earnest upon the advent of the new year. (Note: The right-wing media sting involving an NPR executive discussing, in part, his “discovery” of Madeira wine with supposed Muslim clerics (and the sad, intense gag reflex I had to suppress when I watched his delivery of said anecdote) caution me a little in my pursuit. Just like the not infrequent self-doubt about the high level of pretentiousness involved in both wearing a gray scarf with a red leather jacket and blogging about digging my toes into the black volcanic sand of Positano’s blissful beach, so do I seek to avoid becoming too enamored with my "sophisticated" new expat palate).

My first-ever wine tasting excursion takes us to a vineyard near the town of Orvieto, in Umbria. Orvieto is famous for its sweet white and, if the locals are to be believed, its cathedral. The town itself sits atop sheer cliffs and commands an impressive view of the famous countryside—that view you expect when you move to Italy. We spend the night in an old converted abbey called La Badia at the base of the cliffs, where we can see the cathedral as easily as those above can see us. Que bella, this place. Cedars and olive trees sway in the spring breeze, and dozens of ravens circle the abbey’s bell tower below the loving sun.

It’s bottling day today at Custodi, and at first glance it’s a large and bustling operation. We learn that the vineyard produces 40-50,000 bottles per year, which is either a lot or a little, I have no idea. Half of those are the Orvieto white, a combination of Chardonnay and four other kinds of grapes I’ve never heard of. It’s so clean, so pure, I feel like I could drink it with anything, or nothing, and be happy for many a long afternoon. More on that later. But upon closer examination we see that the assembly line from clean, empty bottles to full and sealed cases for shipment is entirely contained in a semi-truck trailer. About a dozen men bustle about verifying each empty bottle’s purity, overseeing the gush of wine or stamp of cork, loading and hefting cases, shouting above the hum of the machines. Grapes are generally picked here in September (or late October/ early November for the rare and very sweet Pertusa, like an eiswein), fermented in the huge metal vats behind us for a few months and then stored in bottles or other containers for another amount of time, either months or years depending on the type of wine, flavor, vintage, art/whim of the vintner. These grapes were picked in September last and have transitioned to the bottle on their long journey to our thirsty throats.

We sit to a table set with glasses and plastic plates. Our host brings us toast soaked in olive oil. We learn that olive oil can be as diverse as wine, and later ravenously buy multiple bottles. We start with the white, move on to two reds, the first of which is fantastic, the kind of red I like. Described as good-bodied, full, dry, and persistent, I detect that distinct harshness on the edge, common among the local and Sicilian reds I’ve had at home in Naples, but it’s muted enough for me to taste the smell, as it were. I enjoy the fruit, the sweetness, because of its bitter frame. I buy this one, called Piancoleto. Julie does not enjoy it.

The second red is called, tellingly, Austero, and is described as full-bodied, strong, persistent and warm. I think of half-collapsed log cabins described as “rustic.” It’s harsh, and I’m not there yet. I fully believe in the depth of enjoyment residing within that bottle, and maybe in a decade or so I’ll bore some new acquaintances with my re-discovery of Custodi's Austero, but not today.

Our fourth and final is the dessert Pertusa, for which they bring out little cookies instead of toast. It has the color and flavor of honey, so sweet you can’t hold it long on your tongue. They only make 600 bottles per year of this wine, which clearly has a very unique role in the collector’s cellar.

But the white is the star, the wine we’ll remember and the wine we gift to our friends Zach and Kristin, who are watching Aryn this weekend. It tastes like sunshine and breeze, like little white flowers. We have it with a cheese plate in a jazz club, and I can’t stop smiling. We have it with local artisan honey and fresh bread, and it changes, sweetens, in my mouth. This is the first time I’ve experienced how a wine can change with the food you’re eating. I drink it with my dinner of wild boar on pasta in wild boar sauce with a side of wild boar, and it declines, almost sours, beaten back. I need a stronger wine for this entrée, but a savvier foodie would choose a lighter meal to complement the wine. The live band, not due to go on for another two hours, continues their warmup jam session for an audience of two, and now an audience of you. Bravo, Orvieto. Bravo.

Primavera

The Italian word for spring, “Primavera,” gives a clear understanding by its very music how this season is viewed here. I’ve always been partial to autumn, even though it signaled the start of another school year for most of my formative years, but here I, too, love the spring. There aren’t many deciduous leaves in southern Italy, and the winter landscape still has a fair amount of green in it (nearly as much as Ireland’s, in fact). Spring, however, is when a green and brown world explodes into brilliant pinks, reds, yellows and golds as dozens of wildflowers burst from the earth like fireworks in celebration of the warmth to come.

It rains a lot during the Neapolitan winters, and no one hates the rain like Italians. This is a land entirely given over to celebration of the sun. Outside seating at restaurants may have an awning over most of their tables, but Italians will stand and wait indefinitely for a table inside if it’s raining. The great Italian hangout spots—walking along the promenade and the wide pedestrian zone streets, posing along the waterfront, lounging in the park—are all empty if there’s a hint of water from above.

“How was your vacation?” they’ll ask.
“Wonderful, we went to Ireland, we saw the—“
“Did it rain?”
“Of course, but we got to see the—“
“Oh Mamma mia, it must have been terrible!”

But spring signals the end of the rainy winter. The sun has come back from wherever you banished it, malocchio, and we can emerge from our sadness to once again live. The farm hands all have smiles on their faces as they ready the fields. Soon, gold then green stalks in narrow rows greet my morning bus ride into the office. April, here, is the cruelest month because you have to show up for work occasionally, and you can’t just rush outside all day to soak up the returning sun.

Jackets stay on even in temperatures well into the 70s, but the zippers get lower and the buttons start popping off one by one. Soon the men’s skin-tight shirts with impressive popped collars will be unbuttoned to the navel, and the girls will celebrate that which nature and a decent surgeon bestowed. The prosecco and caffe di nonno will be cold and the summer evenings’ warmth the subject of a million songs. But just now, when the chilly mornings make you debate wearing a jacket and the noontime sun nibbles at your ear and whispers of a hammock and a brief repose, the whole earth’s foreplay, like a lover, gives new life.

Ireland, Part 2

Driving south through the narrowest of streets (is it really that expensive to add another 18 inches of pavement?), I’m growing more and more used to this left side of the road thing. I still have no idea where other cars are, or where to look to find them. It’s still disorienting having so little car to my right and so much to my left—I’ve probably run Julie into the sides of many a vine-covered embankment, but she has graciously stayed quiet.

“It’s much easier being a passenger,” she remarks when she decides to drive for a mile or two.

I’m crawling up the back of my seat, not from anything she’s doing behind the wheel but from my own disorientation in the left-hand passenger seat. “I can’t agree,” I mutter through gritted teeth, and am happy to drive again.

Driving in the cities is easy, though, because I just follow the traffic. The Irish know what they’re doing, because for them the left-hand side is right. (Get it? Ha. I hate myself.)

We’re off to the cliffs of Moher. The road takes us past Dunguaire (or is it Dunedain?) Castle, a cold-looking tower above a black bog. Water rushes out of the side of a hill into the deceptive stillness and shallows. We sneak around on the same path where knights and princesses, fairies and ancient sprites have played for millennia. Puck of Pook’s Hill smiles from just behind that branch. No, over here! There! Quick now, here, now, always! Aryn lists this castle as her favorite part of the trip—even more than jumping on the hotel beds.

The countryside changes slightly, subtly, hinting that this small island has a nuanced depth that years couldn’t scratch at. We wonder aloud how different it might look in the summer, with leaves, flowers, heather in bloom, grass and ivy thriving. We’ve said we’ll come back to most places we’ve visited so far, but I’d be surprised if we never see this land in season, with every shop open and the weather ten or so degrees warmer. (Note: February is one of the drier months of the year here, and one of the cheapest, so if cost is a factor don’t wait ‘til the summer to visit.)

The road signs in Irish and English, the conversations in pubs during Sunday afternoon soccer matches that sound like no language I’ve heard, the look among strangers to the strongest English speaker when a question is posed, remind me that even here (oh yes), here English is also the language of the conqueror.


Travel is a funny thing. We search for the unique, the authentic foreign experience, but our search takes us to places that millions before have recommended, to share an experience with those chattering, camera-toting hoards lucky enough to get there too. Do we want to eat pizza at Da Michele’s because Julie Roberts did in Eat, Pray, Love, or because it’s the best pizza ever? (It is.) Do we want to see the cliffs of Moher because we saw them in the Princess Bride as the cliffs of Insanity? And if the answer is yes, does that lessen the authenticity of our experience any more than the cart selling keychains or the wire mesh fence obstructing our view from Giotto’s Tower?

Because, grinning fiercely from atop the Cliffs into the wind whistling in from Nova Scotia with nary a hill nor tree nor blade of grass to slow its mighty course, gulls riding the updrafts 700 feet above the spray from exploding North Atlantic breakers, my birthday memory is worthy of nostalgia without qualification. When I joke in the future about the twelfth anniversary of my 29th birthday, I won’t be thinking about my eyesight, hairline, muscle tone or strong joints. I’ll be carrying a little girl with muddy boots, listening to the wind tear at our raincoat hoods, walking the well-trod paths high above the cold, iron-colored sea.

Ireland, Part 1

The Emerald Isle has a lot of red in it, we notice, as the ferry passes out of the jetties and begins to jostle with the mighty waves of the North Atlantic. There’s a lot of brown, too, to say nothing of the thick, black clay at a construction site and the mossy gray of boulder fields and stone fences. We see the sun sparkle on the red of dead heather and the dark brown of seaweed in low tide, and the cliffs of Moher hulk in the distance. As the Aran Islands come into view ahead of us and the waves from the tip of Greenland rock our boat harder and harder, Aryn learns the dizzy exhaustion of seasickness. Luckily, we pull into the harbor of Inis Mor before she gets the full experience, and by the time we spy the castle on a hill not far distant, she’s as ready for adventure as we are.

We have no plan. That’s not unlike us, but we were going to borrow a guidebook from the library or buy a map or something before coming, and we didn’t. At least we remembered the Garmin, and she got us to the ferry and, last night, pretty close to the hotel and, earlier, somewhere in a not-so-close neighborhood of six one-way streets behind and across the river from Trinity College in Dublin. No tours on Fridays, by the way, but the book of Kells exhibit is fantastic.

So, without a plan, when Aryn steps off the boat onto the Aran Island Inis Mor, we see signs for bike rental gleaming bright purple in the sunlight, and know. The guy handing out maps who promises a free baby seat confirms, and we dig out helmets as they bring our bikes around. Our path takes us up, up through tiny roads and past solitary cows and horses in miniature pastures. Rock is everywhere, as if this land was never meant for farming but no one bothered to tell the Irish, and they cling to their land like a religion (or a gun).

The tower atop what I overhear is “the tallest point on the islands” is closed according to the sign, but not according to the broken gate and empty doorway. At the bottom of the winding staircase is a bizarre collection of ancient furniture, farm implements, tools and dead flowers, and atop the tower—oh my. My breath catches. My words fail. If you’ve ever seen a photo album of this fair land, and stopped to stare at one photo in particular, the one that looks like it was taken from a low-flying aircraft over a dozen cows crammed into a hundred little fields, the sun magnifying colors unused to its direct rays, a lone old man toiling away in one corner, waves breaking on a rocky shores in another, a sea-foam green farmhouse in still another corner and a crumbling, ruined castle just off-center—this is my view, and more. I stand transfixed like Frodo in the Seat of Seeing in Amon Hen, like Mowgli in Ka’s gaze, like a baby on the 4th of July.

Riding helps me feel like I’m working off these enormous meals. The “full Irish” breakfast of tomato, sausage, egg, black and white puddings (I preferred the white), thick bacon, toast, tea/coffee/etc. Julie rediscovered her love of Kiwi from our breakfast spread in Galway. Lunch of hamburgers or chicken Goujons, fish n’ chips always served with a salad and maybe a pint. Dinner of seafood chowder, salmon and soda bread, 100% Irish steak, cottage pie, probably a pint but also a full selection of wines from around the world. This is one of the few places outside Italy where I’ve seen espresso and even a macchiato equivalent as a standard on the café menu.

We buy sweaters from the Aran Sweater Market as souvenirs. I forgo the woolen scarf and tweed cap and Gaelic-swirl pewter pocketwatch. Maybe I’ll get a tweed jacket in Scotland this summer?

Riding downhill back toward the boat, Aryn keeps telling me to slow down. She has no trouble with sea-sickness on the way home, nor does she have trouble entertaining the elderly couple at dinner (the only ones who pronounced the Aran Islands like Aryn’s name, by the way), so everything’s back to normal.


The kind of stories we'll tell our friends about this trip will be the ones about leaving our car in the parking garage in Galway because we don’t notice it closes at six on Sundays. Or driving for nearly an hour on a road our GPS didn’t recognize, imagining her wondering how we were making 120 km/hr over muddy fields and stone fences. Or Aryn asking us, disconcertingly, as the plan is just about to touch down, “Do you have Jesus in your heart?”

We probably won’t mention that Ireland is very much a country, with McDonalds and tattoo parlors (I’ll get that shamrock tattoo next trip), road construction and election posters (advantage: Fine Gael). Subdivisions outside old towns could be Eden Prairie, Fredricksberg, any American suburb. The history and life at Trinity College and the Book of Kells is fascinating, and it’s surrounded by the life and energy of that interchangeable group of college girls in sweatpants, and that same lone professor with a graying ponytail.

We'll gloss over what the English did to them "for eight hundred long years," as the McCourt family often mentions. We love it here.

One man, two years, 365 pizzas

[this story first appeared in the May 21 edition of the Naples "Panorama" and is reprinted here by permission of the author--namely, me]

History was made at the Pizzeria Giardino d’Averno Friday, May 14, as Sale Lilly ate pizza number 365.

The now-famous pizza aficionado has been visiting pizzerias all throughout Naples, the surrounding areas and Europe—even as far away as Scotland—on a quest to eat 365 pizzas in two years and, in the process, find the perfect pizza.

“Of all the places to meet Neapolitans,” said Lilly, “the pizzeria is the best. Pizzas are made out in the open and it’s a very honest experience. The pizzaiolo’s personal reputation is on the line. When you order pasta, it’s made behind a wall in the kitchen, and there’s no interaction with the chef.”

Lilly is actually Lt. Sale Lilly, an active-duty service member stationed here, and his tour in Naples began as many others’ do, with a desire to try to local food and do a little traveling. What began as a simple goal of eating at all the pizzerias on his various guidebooks’ “top ten” lists has turned into a journey through the world of Italian pizza and the discovery of dozens of small, unknown pizzerias with a lot to offer.

“About a month after I arrived, I had done what I set out to do and I had a lot of the ‘best’ pizzas,” said Lilly. “But there are too many good pizzas for any guidebook to be conclusive about the best. My number one pizza [the Tonnato from Pellone Pizzeria in Naples] wasn’t in any guidebook I found. But my number two pizza was.”

His restraints are considerable: he cannot repeat the same pizza at the same pizzeria, he must eat the whole pizza (half if it’s a pizza al metro), and if the pizzeria offers a pizza bearing the name of the restaurant, he must try it. The result has been a sampling of 365 pizzas from more than 200 pizzerias throughout Europe, all carefully cataloged, mapped and reviewed at pizzasforsale.com. He ate 330 of his pizzas inside Italy, and his worst pizza was also his most expensive—30 Euros in Monaco.

“Neapolitans claim to have invented pizza,” he said, “and the Margherita was invented here,” so he focused most of his attention on Naples and the surrounding area. (The pizza Margherita was invented for the visit of Queen Margherita to Naples, the ingredients intended to reflect the colors of the new Italian flag.)

According to Lilly, there are more than 6,000 pizzerias in Naples alone and 12,000 in the Campania region. “I was able to try a larger sample than any of the guidebooks,” he said.

It would take several lifetimes to eat through all the pizzas here, but Lilly’s pizza eating days may be numbered, at least for now. When taking his last bite of his last pizza, to thunderous applause, someone in the crowd shouted, “Order number 366!”

Lilly smiled. “It might be a while,” he said.

Always a Mexican food lover, he “converted” to pizzas because he moved to what he calls “Pizza Heaven.”

“Any above-average pizza I had in was well above average,” he said, “and much better than anything I’ve had in the States.” He will be moving on to Virginia this summer, where another adventure no doubt awaits.

With two years and 365 pizzas under his belt, Lilly has learned a thing or two about eating pizza here. His website lists three rules for ordering the best pizza: order pizza after 7:30 p.m.; only eat pizza where there are plenty of Italians; and order the pizza bearing the restaurant’s name. “Practice your Italian and get to know your pizzaiolo,” he added. “You’ll get better service that way and you’ll have a better experience overall.”

Lilly’s time in Naples is coming to a close, but he has left a legacy and a challenge for the rest of us remaining behind.

“Neapolitans are rightly very proud of their pizza,” said Lilly. “And I found that if you take an intense interest in something they’re so proud of, you become like family and just have a great experience at the pizzeria and throughout your stay here.”