[Dec. 2024] During our winter holiday in Sorrento, southern Italy, we had booked a guided visit to the ruins in Ercolano, a town on the outskirts of Naples.
Five days after the start of our holiday, we finally got to do some sightseeing.
One thing we miscalculated was that we had to change trains once to get from Sorrento’s train station to Ercolano.
The transfer station is called Torre Annunziata.
It’s a place I’ve never heard of, but my husband says it’s a familiar name.
That’s because one of his childhood friends was a kid named Nicolino who was from this town.
Nicolino cleverly teamed up with Nicolone, who was from Messina, Sicily, and bartered stamps for comics.
They sold the comics at a second-hand bookshop and used the earned money to buy roast chicken for everyone to eat together.
This was during my husband’s childhood, about half a century ago.
At the time, there were many families who had immigrated from southern Italy to the suburbs of Milan where he grew up.
And those children from the south had been acting cleverly and cunningly since they were very young apparently.
Anyway, this train, the Circumvesuviana, is so uncomfortable!
As I mentioned before, on the first day, we paid €70 (for two people) for the return ticket between Naples and Sorrento and were ripped off.
The carriages were covered in graffiti.
The seats were made of hard plastic, and even though it was so cold, there was no heating.
Maybe it didn’t bother people around here, who valued saving on heating so much (our host of Airbnb was exactly this kind of person).
We had to use this line many times during this holiday, but it was such a painful journey that I wondered if it was worth it.
What made my impression even worse was that the woman at the ticket counter in Sorrento was nasty.
Even though she knew the train was about to depart, she deliberately lingered and didn’t stop talking to her colleague.
Perhaps she enjoyed causing trouble for people and demonstrate her small power over them through such trivial things.
At least this time, we managed to get on the train just in time.
By the way, there are apparently many notorious towns along this line.
I don’t know myself, but according to my husband, there are many familiar place names that are often on some crime news called Cronaca Nera in Italy.
It seems that tourists rarely get involved in such crimes, though.
I guess one of the benefits of travelling is being able to learn things like this on the spot.
