Rick Steves’ Travel Blog

Through the ongoing coronavirus crisis, we’re looking for bright spots. And one of the brightest comes in the form of updates from our tour guides around Europe. Hearing from our European friends is a great reminder that we are all in this together — and we will be together again, when the crisis is over.

Continuing our weekly series, here’s what we’ve been hearing from our guides this week:

In Athens, Filippos Kanakaris describes the Orthodox Easter celebration that took place in Greece earlier this week:

“In Greece, we have been on a very strict lockdown for the last four weeks, which includes a certain procedure in order to be allowed to go out. That includes specifying the reason (which you send in a text to a relevant authority) and always carrying a valid form of identification with you in case the police stops you in one of the very frequent random checks that are being performed on a daily basis. The whole country has gone into an eerie silent mode, and empty streets have turned the urban centers into ghost towns. I take some very empty photographs when I take my bike on authorized trips.

“Churches have also been closed to the public for weeks now, and for the first time in centuries, Easter celebrations were confined within the premises of our apartments without any guests allowed. This has been unthinkable for the Greeks, considering the intensity of Easter celebrations in the country — which include the consumption of a lot of traditional food such as lamb on a spit.

“Despite all these unusual times we all live in, the mayors of Athens and other large communities went ahead with the fireworks associated with the occasion. (Fireworks and loud noises represent the loud victory of life over death that happened through the resurrection of Jesus.) I’m not religious at all, but the experience of the fireworks was a rather spiritual one. It worked as a symbolic reinstatement of the belief that there is light somewhere at this end of this very long tunnel.”

In Switzerland, Mirjam Grob writes:

“In January, I moved to a very small village in the countryside of French-speaking Switzerland. Especially in these days, I am very happy to live here. The solidarity between people here is great: We take care of each other, check in regularly (especially with the elderly), and keep on singing and playing music together at safe distances and around campfires in the evening, so nobody becomes too isolated.

“I have also been busy taking care of my garden. Together with three other women of the little village, we garden almost every day. It is very likely that prices for vegetables will increase a lot this summer, as Swiss farmers were not able to get the farm workers from other countries as usual (who were paid far less than Swiss workers and made it possible to sell the vegetables for the lower prices we were used to during the past decades). As I also lost almost all my income — with museums being closed and translation work also becoming scarce — I am very happy that I will have at least a lot of vegetables from my garden!

“I also enclose a little pictures of my lovely cat, who is very happy to have me spending more time with him, sitting on one of the jigsaw puzzles that I have been doing a lot of recently.”

In France, Arnaud Servignat posted this musical video playing along with Vivaldi’s “Nisi Dominus — Cum Dederit”:

In Turkey, Lale Sürmen Aran wrote to tell us about the very important national celebration that took place earlier this week and how it was modified because of coronavirus concerns:

“April 23 is both Turkey’s national holiday and Children’s Day. In fact, this year was the 100th anniversary of the Turkish National Assembly. Under normal circumstances, every year, Turkey invites hundreds of children from around the world to celebrate with Turkish children. Children fill up stadiums and celebrate. There are parades and fireworks. This year, instead, we all went out to our balconies, or stood in front of open windows, and sang the national anthem exactly at 21:00. And to make up for the cancelled celebrations, they streamed a concert in which Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, and important Turkish music, were performed in striking locations.”

Lale also wrote that her family had a scary week: Her 12-year-old son began running a fever of over 105 degrees. He was taken to the hospital, where hazmat-suited medical staff gave him tests for various diseases — including COVID-19 (all covered by the national healthcare system). Fortunately, he tested negative and is feeling better now. Lale notes that one big challenge was isolating him at home while they waited for results: “In Istanbul, isolation is not easy in the condominiums that most of us live in.” They were also contacted by members of the Ministry of Health’s “tracking crew” — contact tracers assigned with investigating possible COVID-19 cases.

In Italy, Susanna Perrucchini writes about another big celebration happening this week, which is causing her to re-evaluate an old holiday through new eyes:

“This Saturday, April 25th, is Italy’s Liberation Day — in fact, it’s the 75th anniversary of the liberation from Nazi occupation and the fascist regime. This year, that holiday is taking on a new importance. Today we are fighting a virus that is already decimating many of our older people — including those who were born before or during World War II. With them, we are losing parents, grandparents, dear loved ones, and our legacy…our link to a recent past.

“Only one year ago, many Italians would have celebrated this holiday by taking a few extra days off work to fare il ponte — ‘make a bridge’ between the April 25 and May 1 holidays. Many of us would have had a picnic or a day trip to the countryside or the sea. But instead we are all at home, feeling a sense of impotence and great tragedy. We are just starting to realize how our lives have been turned upside-down…just like that, almost in the blink of an eye.

“Because of the ‘Eternal Lockdown,’ our celebrations will be virtual, starting at 11:00 with the National Anthem (for details, see www.25aprile2020.it). Reading about the celebrations, these words struck me: ‘On April 25, liberty is reborn. This year, on the 75th anniversary of the Liberation, we need, more than ever, to celebrate our freedom, to look at the future with hope and courage.’

“I don’t see these words as easy rhetoric. I see them, maybe for the first time in my life, with a strong need to go back to our deep roots and values. As Italians, we have never been very patriotic. Italy started World War II allied with Hitler and finished on the other side, with the winners — quite an achievement! We always felt a bit silly declaring our love and pride for our country. We believed that criticizing and blaming others (politicians, local authorities, public servants, you name it) was the only way to face our deep frustrations and anger for being born in a country that’s so beautiful and yet so inefficient and corrupt.

“But I decided that today I want to be optimistic, because we need that now more than ever. This epidemic may give us all a chance for personal growth, and maybe for a new global awareness of our true needs as human beings. I never longed so much for a walk in a park, with trees and flowers and fresh air. Being confined in my flat, I feel I am losing my inner balance — and being close to the sea, countryside, or nature is the best medicine.

“I looked at those black-and-white pictures of April 25th, 1945, and I saw cheering crowds in the streets of Italy: men and women hugging, kissing, and dancing with wide smiles on their faces. War was over, and so was death, hunger, and misery. They needed to believe they were facing the dawn of a new, bright era with no starvation and violence.

“Those images will help me remember that losing hope is the worst we can all do. Seventy-five years ago, from the ruins, rubble, and debris of the past, they started to build — stone by stone, brick by brick — a new country. Endurance and resilience are needed. And we can look at our recent past to find them in our people.”

And finally, from Naples, Alfredo Cafasso Vitale offers this essay, which he calls “Pane e Camorra” (loosely translated as “Bread and the local Mafia family”):

“The baskets shown in the picture below — called panaro solidale, ‘supportive basket’ — have been posted, tweeted, shared, and printed all over the world. Stars like Madonna have chosen to share these images, to highlight to their followers how good-hearted and creative the Italians can be in moments of need. This spontaneous initiative by two locals, living along the Spaccanapoli, is however, only one of many in Naples, and its people have initiated to fight the increasing poverty and distress occurring to families during the COVID-19 lockdown.

“The sign reading Chi può metta, chi non può prenda (‘If you can, put in something; if you need, take something out’) is a wonderful motto created by a doctor, Giuseppe Moscati (sainted by Pope John Paul II in 1987), who used to cure poor Neapolitans for free in the early 1900s. In these days of COVID-19, when doctors and health-care personnel are on the front line of the fight against this deadly virus, the motto resonates perfectly.

“Apart from the obvious humanitarian response to assist those in desperate need, there is another underlying need for these initiatives: to counter the efforts of the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia, which is trying to take advantage of people’s distress.

“In the words of judge Catello Maresca, who coordinated the capture of the Camorra boss Michele Zagaria in 2011 and today is heading one of the food distribution initiatives: ‘They pretend to be your friend, lending money to people in need, or buying them food or other primary needs. But tomorrow, once the emergency over, they will hand them a heavy bill. When they will ask a housewife or a retired person to hide drugs in their homes, who will be able to refuse?’

“Some might have heard of the caffè sospeso (‘spended coffee’), which is a unique Neapolitan feature.  A customer in a bar will take a coffee, but will sometimes pay for two. This coffee ‘credit’ can then be passed on to someone who cannot afford to pay for one. The COVID-19 version of this feature is now spesa sospesa — ‘suspended shopping.’ When shopping in a neighborhood grocery, butcher or bakery, one can pay for something to leave for people in need, on the same principle as the coffee.

“The familiar hum and whine of scooters is an integral part of the noise of life in the central historic neighborhoods as anything else. Silenced at the beginning of the lockdown, these scooters have now found another function: distributing food boxes, prepared both from the municipalities and from associations (like the evangelical Tabita Onlus). The Red Cross has also distributed more than three thousand food boxes during these lockdown weeks.

“Other initiatives involving citizens, municipalities, the Catholic Church, and NGOs include food vouchers, tables outside buildings collecting food, distribution of free books, and all kinds of other services offered to the those in need, in a network of solidarity unseen  in the last decades of globalized economy.

“Napoli has a unique mixture of social, economic, and cultural classes, all sharing the same spaces, which are mainly, but not exclusively in the historic center of the city — neighborhoods like Quartieri Spagnoli, Vergini, Sanità, and Pallonetto a Santa Lucia.

“The ground floors of the (ancient) buildings, called palazzi, are made up of bassi, the one-room, ground floor apartments where the poorest inhabitants live. The higher floors house the more spacious apartments of the signori, the much wealthier citizens live. These two diverse groups of people continue to share the same building in an everyday dynamic unknown in any other city in the world.

“The streets of the Quartieri used to be the domain of the scugnizzi, the poor and aggressive yet sweet-hearted street kids, who are part of the iconography of Neapolitan art and cinema.

“Today, a more varied population — made up of Neapolitans and immigrants from African, Asian, and Eastern European countries — shares life in the bassi, and today’s signori are mostly Neapolitan intellectuals and young professionals that find here beautiful, historic apartments, often with breathtaking views, at reasonable prices.

“The people of the bassi and the signori share more than just housing. They share, in fact, everyday life, with the same open-air markets, and the difficulties of living in a city where often legal and illegal practices live side by side.

“Naples is indubitably a complex and contradictory city, and, as a result, it has generated a series of misconceptions: It is not easy to distinguish the traits of the Neapolitan identity from the stereotypes, and it is difficult for non-Neapolitans to fully grasp the delicate balance between legality and what here is called arte di arrangiarsi — ‘the art of making do’ — that often collides with the Camorra and for sure with a parallel, untaxed economical system.”

It’s clear that each country and region — and each individual — is dealing with their own challenges during this time. And yet, it’s also clear that we are all in this together.

European travel is a sensory experience…especially Italy, and especially Naples. And in these sensory-deprived times, I find myself thinking back on happy memories in one of Italy’s most vivid, most intense, and most sensory cities.

Even if we’ve had to postpone trips to Europe, I believe a daily dose of travel dreaming can actually be good medicine. Here’s another one of my favorite travel memories — a reminder of what’s waiting for you in Europe at the other end of this crisis.

Strolling through Naples, I remember my first visit to the city as a wide-eyed 18-year-old. My travel buddy and I had stepped off the train into vast Piazza Garibaldi. A man in a white surgeon’s gown approached me and said, “Please, it is very important. We need blood for a dying baby.” Naples was offering a dose of reality we weren’t expecting on our Italian vacation. We immediately made a U-turn, stepped back into the station, and made a beeline for Greece.

While that delayed my first visit by several years, I’ve been back to Naples many times since. And today, even with its new affluence and stress on law and order, the city remains appalling and captivating at the same time. It’s Italy’s third-largest city, as well as its most polluted and crime-ridden. But this tangled urban mess still somehow manages to breathe, laugh, and sing with a joyful Italian accent. Naples offers the closest thing to “reality travel” in Western Europe: churning, fertile, and exuberant.

With more than two million people, Naples has almost no open spaces or parks, which makes its ranking as Europe’s most densely populated city plenty evident. Watching the police try to enforce traffic sanity is almost comical. But Naples still surprises me with its impressive knack for living, eating, and raising children with good humor and decency. There’s even a name for this love of life on the street: basso living.

In Naples, I spend more time in the local neighborhoods than the palaces and museums. Since ancient Greek times, the old city center has been split down the middle by a long, straight street called Spaccanapoli (“split Naples”). Just beyond it, the Spanish Quarter climbs into the hills. And behind the Archaeological Museum is perhaps the most colorful district of all, Sanità.

Walking through the Spaccanapoli neighborhood, I venture down narrow streets lined with tall apartment buildings, walk in the shade of wet laundry hung out to dry, and slip into time-warp courtyards. Couples artfully make love on Vespas while surrounded by more fights and smiles per cobblestone than anywhere else in Italy. Black-and-white death announcements add to the clutter on the walls of buildings. Widows sell cigarettes from plastic buckets.

I spy a woman overseeing the action from her balcony on the fifth floor. I buy two carrots as a gift and she lowers her bucket to pick them up. One wave populates six stories of balconies, each filling up with its own waving family. A contagious energy fills the air. I snap a photo and suddenly people in each window and balcony are vying for another. Mothers hold up babies, sisters pose arm in arm, a wild-haired pregnant woman stands on a fruit crate holding her bulging belly, and an old, wrinkled woman fills her paint-starved window frame with a toothy grin.

On a nearby street I run across a small niche in the wall dedicated to Diego Maradona, the fabled soccer star who played for Naples in the 1980s. Locals consider soccer almost a religion, and this guy was practically a deity. This little Chapel of Maradona includes a “hair of Diego” and a teardrop from the city when he went to another team for more money. It’s these little eccentric passions that make exploring Naples such fun.

Around the corner there’s an entire street lined with shops selling tiny components of fantastic manger scenes, including figurines caricaturing politicians and local celebrities — should I want to add a Putin or a Berlusconi to my Nativity set.

The abundance of gold and silver shops here makes me think this is where stolen jewelry ends up. But I’ve learned that’s not quite true. According to locals, thieves quickly sell their goods and the items are melted down immediately. New pieces go on sale as soon as they cool.

Paint a picture with these thoughts: Naples has the most intact ancient Roman street plan anywhere. Imagine life here in the days of Caesar, with street-side shop fronts that close up to become private homes after dark. Today is just one more page in a 2,000-year-old story of city activity: meetings, beatings, and cheatings; kisses, near misses, and little-boy pisses.

The only predictable elements of this Neapolitan mix are the boldness of mopeds — concerned residents will tug on their lower eyelid, warning you to be wary — and the friendliness of shopkeepers.

To cap my walk, I pop into a grocery and ask the man to make me his best ham-and-mozzarella sandwich. I watch, enthralled, as he turns sandwich-making into a show. After demonstrating the freshness of his rolls with a playful squeeze, he assembles the components, laying on a careful pavement of salami, bringing over a fluffy mozzarella ball as if performing a kidney transplant, slicing a tomato with rapid-fire machine precision, and lovingly pitting the olives by hand. He then finishes it off with a celebratory drizzle of the best oil. Six euros and a smile later, I find the perfect bench upon which to enjoy my lunch while watching the Neapolitan parade of life.

An older man with a sloppy slice of pizza joins me. Moments later, a stylish couple on a bike rolls by — she sits on the handlebars, giggling as she faces her man, hands around his neck as he cranes to see where they’re going.

I say, “Bella Italia.”

My bench mate says, “No, bella Napoli.”

I say, “Napoli…is both beautiful and a city of chaos.”

He agrees, but insists, “Bella chaos.”

“Tell me, what is Napoli in one word?” I ask.

Turning his head, he watches a woman stride by. Then, with a long string of mozzarella stretching between his mouth and what remains of his pizza, he chews for a moment, pauses, and says, “Abbondante.”

I agree. “Abundant.”

(This story is excerpted from my upcoming book, For the Love of Europe — collecting 100 of my favorite memories from a lifetime of European travel. It’s coming out in July, and available for pre-order. And you can also watch a video clip related to this story: Just visit  Rick Steves Classroom Europe  and search for “urban Naples.”)