We reach obidos by noon. A walled and white town on a hill crowned by a castle and tower, obidos's beauty has earned it a stop on every traveller's itinerary. There are few of us at this time of the year, but all the commercial activity in town is geared toward the tourist trade. Something inevitably goes out of the life of a town when that happens. The houses are appealing, bedecked with flowers and the whitewash often trimmed with sunny yellow borders. The largest wisteria trunk in Christendom travels along the side of a village house. Many sweet churches invite one to stop awhile. After Estremoz and evora, we're less enchanted here. We could have been the first tourists ever in Estremoz as far as I could tell, and evora, a UNESCO World Heritage site like obidos, is not at all subsumed by tourism.

Since we're celebrating my birthday today, Ed urges me to find something special. Because Portugal is known for table linens, coverlets, and sheets, I stop at a shop on an upper street. Everything looks enticing. I select creamy white scalloped sheets with hand-embroidered flowers my mother would have wanted.

At the pousada, the castle at the top of town, we are given the room in the tall tower. At first, we're thrilled. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden hair. We cross a battlement with an enormous view to reach the tower. The entrance opens into a lower room with a little place to sit, an armoire, and a bathroom. To reach the bedroom, you essentially climb an almost vertical, ankle-breaker ladder into a dungeon room with a wood-paneled, curtained canopy bed (how did they ever get it up here?) and a small desk on which waits the pousada's chilled champagne. The three windows are slits through which arrows were shot from crossbows. Since hardly any light comes in, we turn on the bedside lamps, both of which have Christmas-light wattage. The room is literally stone cold. Up this high the wind screams around the corners. Do I feel the tower sway? Downstairs is even colder, and our two bags take most of the s.p.a.ce. Although it is only late afternoon, we decide to open the champagne and toast my having a birthday in a real medieval tower. How often will that occur? Ed turns on the television, and from under the duvet in the knight-in-armor bed, we watch a hilariously terrible Elvis Presley movie in English with Portuguese subt.i.tles. By the end, we have finished the whole bottle. To add to the surreal, the pousada dining room is empty except for one table of extremely large and well-dressed Portuguese who look as if they stepped out of Botero paintings. They hardly speak at all through course after course of an excellent dinner.

What dream will come to me on my birthday high in a tower? Images influenced by the wedding of Afonso V and Isabel, who wed in the peaceful church on the parque when the groom was ten, the bride eight. Or maybe a narrative about the famous Josefa de obidos, the seventeenth-century local woman artist much revered, though only two of her paintings remain in town. Nothing, I hope, about the pillory outside Santa Maria. But after the champagne, after the red wine with dinner, I sink into the dark, dark bed and sleep with no dreams at all. Ed is dreaming something because he laughs aloud in his sleep. "What's funny?" I ask in the dark.

"You."

We leave early, after a walk around the town walls and castle. Some distance restores the original enchantment of obidos. Moorish porches, stone steps up and down pa.s.sageways, and the moon-white houses in the early morning certainly cast their spell. And anywhere the scent of orange blossom drifts, I'm happy.

The roads bear much more traffic in the north than in the Alentejo. Portuguese drivers seem rather reckless. We're used to Italian roads, where people drive fast but with their minds on their business. They usually have considerable skill at the wheel. We trail a truck loaded with cork for miles as it weaves down the road. At each b.u.mp the cork flies in the air. A man sits on top of a hay wagon pulled by a donkey, driving others on the road to rash acts. Two lanes become three-the middle of the road seems totally what the boys in my hometown used to call "guts go." You keep to your far side and venture into the middle to pa.s.s, straddling the yellow line. Two wagons full of Gypsies, pulled by horses with other horses attached behind, trot down the highway. Women ride up top, wearing flowered scarves and nursing their babies. Everyone swerves around them. This is crazy. And dangerous. I try to control Ed's urge to pa.s.s by frequent screams.

We're looking for our country-villa-turned-hotel near Coimbra. When we find it, finally, we come upon a teensy oasis, a dreamy, dreamy house ringed by industry and apartment blocks: what they don't show you on a Web site. The place itself, Quinta das Lagrimas, is glorious, a sprawling yellow villa with converging stone staircases on the second level. It's a microcosm of the city of Coimbra, a fabulous small city on the Mondego River, with ugliness all around. We walk in from the hotel, past a fantastic park for children. All the architectural styles of Portugal are reproduced in a miniature village. Once again we say to each other what a perfect vacation Portugal offers for a family with children. The interior of the town drops us into the Old World. A woman with a basket of bread balanced on her head makes her way up a flight of stone steps from one street to the other. Another two carry on their heads big baskets of laundry. The university, oldest and most venerable in Portugal, centers on a square surrounded by buildings where students and professors for centuries have studied and learned. The bell tower dates from 1728. One of the bells, known as the cabra, the nanny goat bell, keeps the official time of the city. This is a walking city. The cafe next to the Santa Cruz church has stoked generations of intellectual coffee sippers both inside, in part of the former church, and at tables outside on the praca. The church itself, once elaborately carved in the Manueline style, looks as if a big wave came over a drip castle. Inside, the calming blue and white tile. Outside, a playful fountain with some of the worst street musicians in the world perched around it. We follow the patterned sidewalks for a four-hour walk, absorbing the vibrant life of the town.

Carlos has given us the name of a tasca. Fortunately, because it's so local we might never have ventured inside if we'd simply peered in the door. Half the size of a one-car garage, the tasca is lined floor to ceiling with notes and drawings from patrons, on napkins, notebook paper, matchbooks-anything. One flick of a match, and we'd be torched. We're squeezed into chairs at a tiny corner table, and three regional cheeses are quickly brought, along with a basket of bread that could bring tears to your eyes. Then we are served bowls of cabbage soup. The Portuguese man at the next table offers us some of his wild boar. This never has happened to me in any other country in the world. Then the waiter appears with a pewter platter of grilled pork with chunks of garlic, coriander, and olive oil, followed by a terra-cotta oven dish of rice and beans in broth. A table of men gnaw at what looks like a heap of bones, then move on to pork stew and a bowl of spinach steaming with garlic. We don't even know the name of the place. Is it Manuel ze Dos Ossos? Carlos's address, scrawled in Ed's notepad, says Beco do Forno, 12, behind the Astoria hotel. We couldn't find it and asked several people for the tasca. All of them, including a policeman, pointed us here. Every bite is de-lish, and we relish the atmosphere of workers and businesspeople all chowing down on hearty food.

The restaurant of the country villa, Quinta das Lagrimas, is called Agua. Open just two weeks, it's in the modern addition to the villa. For my taste, they've made a mistake with this addition. It feels like an industrial park cafe. But the young German chef is deft, and I am blessed with salmon in a poppy sesame crust, a game pie with a dark truffle sauce. Ed has spinach lasagne with saffron and figs. Yikes! But he says, "Not bad." And because he loves cod in all its forms, he orders it with mustard and shallots. This is the first meal we have had in Portugal that only tangentially refers to local tradition. Instead the chef takes in the influences of colonial Portugal. Maybe the people of Coimbra will enjoy this fusion of Portuguese ingredients with references to all the discoverers' conquests in the Americas and the East. I don't know about that saffron and figs, though.

Our trip is coming to an end. So much of Portugal we have missed. We've seen only a few towns in the north, and nothing of the lower Alentejo or the Algarve. I would love to go to Madeira and the Azores. To those ancient G.o.ds of the crossroads, I acknowledge how little our choices allow us. Will we return, take another month to explore Portugal? I would like to come back every year and see another piece of this rich puzzle. How little I know. The privilege of this kind of trip is the immersion course in history, art, cuisine, and landscape. How fortunate that our last stop in the north becomes our favorite town.

Guimares, in the Minho area, is absolutely spectacular, an entirely livable town with wooden and iron balconies, and many half-timbered buildings so that you think you've entered a stage set for a Shakespearean play. Is this Amsterdam? England? If so, a sunny England. All around town we come upon shrines with life-size figures, below whom are placed lighted candles and wax ex-votos of heads and limbs. In 1727 these stations of the cross were erected; five remain. In the residential section, among camellia trees, we pa.s.s houses in total ruin next to normal houses with gardens and cherry trees in bloom. On some, wooden shingles have been painted to look like tile in blue and white, though there is not much real tile.

Difficult to find, the small pousada is one of our favorite places we've ever stayed, partly because it opens onto a praca of pleasing dimensions and has the same austere comfort and style of the others, but mainly because of the waiter who tells us, when we say how much we love Portugal, "My country is very small but very much." At breakfast I chat with a woman at the buffet, and somehow she recognizes me as an author she had read, which leads her to invite an entire tour of southern women over to say h.e.l.lo. We have friends in common and much to say. The waiters are all amazed at the furor, and later one discreetly asks me, when their bus has pulled away, "Was madame once a film star?"

In Guimares, a center for cotton and weaving, I buy more sheets, these finer than the ones I found in obidos. "Be careful," the woman who owns the shop tells me, "many are embroidered in China." I find a soft throw and a matela.s.se blanket cover. Ed is dismayed at what this does to our luggage, especially since we already have a goat scent in our sweaters from the skins we bought in Estremoz.

This is a serene town of beauty and "the birthplace of the nation," as is frequently proclaimed. This slogan goes back to the time when the settlement, a far feifdom of Afonso VI, the ruler of Castile and Leon, was given to his daughter and her husband. Their son, also an Afonso, turned against his mother after his father's death and grabbed power from her. He then drove out the Moors and in 1139 secured for himself the t.i.tle of King of Portugal. By 1143 the capital shifted to Coimbra, but memory is long here. I hope they record that he was a terrible son.

The Guimares area had an extensive previous history, as you can see outside town at the Citania de Briteiros (Celtic City) archaeological site. The remains partly predate the Celts (600500 B.C.), with some artifacts dating back to Neolithic times. Many of the votives and carved stones are displayed at the archaeological museum in Guimares, named Martins Sarmento after the local archaeologist who discovered the site.

Before the medieval Afonso a.s.serted himself, a powerful woman with the fantastic name of Mumadona built the castle that dominates the hilltop. Salazar, the dreary twentieth-century dictator of Portugal, used the adjacent palace for a residence. I'm not much on exploring castles anymore-there's a redundancy to the experience-but this one is fun. It anchors one end of the town and opens to a broad view with Mount Penha in the distance.

Although the capital for only a few years, Guimares still displays a proud public aspect-gardens, castle, esplanade, statues. You easily sense that the residents have pride in themselves and cherish their well-preserved medieval buildings and many monuments. Tight cobbled streets lined with handsome townhouses wind off the plazas. Iron grill works ornament windows curtained inside with linen or lace. The commercial main street, planted with flowers, remains completely nontouristy. We discuss whether we would have settled in Portugal if we'd known it instead of Italy. The country is fantastically varied within its small borders. I certainly would be happy getting to know the cuisine for a decade or two. History, beauty, endless beaches, and jewel towns like this one lead us to conclude that we would love the chance to live here part time. And Guimares would be a fine choice. I even pa.s.s a dilapidated house with Moorish touches and an overgrown garden that I could walk into and start sc.r.a.ping and painting.

We stop for several local pastries. Toucinho-do-ceu' must be one of those sweets you have to eat from age four to appreciate. Essentially little flans made of many eggs, pumpkin marmalade, and almonds, they taste cloying and goopy. Pumpkin is used in many local desserts. Pig's blood is another unexpected ingredient in sweets. Today I select only the almond cookies, and Ed has one pastry that is a ringer for a plain old chocolate eclair.

As in the other pousadas, the dining room is a bastion of local recipes and ingredients. The young goat, roasted on a bed of herbs, tastes meltingly tender and zesty. Ed likes the bountiful stew made with a mixture of meats and sausages. We've only had a brief glimpse of the Minho area. We admire the neat hilly vineyards and smart villages, the quick-to-smile faces, and the love lavished on the place by people who live here. Tomorrow we must leave for Sintra and our last night in Portugal.

The hotel in Sintra had a previous life as a fabulous villa called House of Seven Sighs. I feel like sighing, too, since this trip must end. Portugal has surprised me more than any country I've ever visited. With the pousadas waiting each night, the driving became less stressful-we are a.s.sured of a destination with character and a kitchen that knows its business. This must be the least expensive country in Europe for travelling. The pousadas, such grand treats, are expensive here but would be considered moderate anywhere else. Wine, pastries, even hand-embroidered sheets bear retro prices. This last hotel, Palacio de Seteais, is not a pousada, but in the light room with large windows with the sea far behind the formal garden, we find the same hallmark tray with champagne, plus a few silver dishes of dried apricots, dates, figs, and walnuts. On a crystal compote, they've left us sliced fresh fruits. How gracious that hotels routinely welcome guests with such a civilized gesture. Halls and sitting rooms are painted with mythological scenes in soft colors mellowed by a pa.s.sing century. The floors are covered in the famous Portuguese needlepoint rugs, which we have not seen anywhere else in Portugal.

Only a few hours south of Guimares, Sintra is worlds away: a hilly green enclave with a small town cl.u.s.tered around the National Palace, formerly a Moorish palace, which shows in the ground-floor arches, the trim around the roofline. Manueline/ Venetian windows on the second floor somehow adhere stylistically. Inside, we find whole rooms in Sevillian and Mudejar (Muslim converts to Christianity) tiles. One bedroom's walls are covered in biscuit-colored tiles with raised grape leaves. Tile "rugs" imitate Oriental ones. Some of the decor is downright bizarre. One ceiling is painted with 136 magpies, one for each of Queen Filipa's ladies-in-waiting. King Joo considered them gossips because they reported to the queen that he'd been seen kissing another woman. He maintained that he was kissing her "for the good," whatever that meant, and he painted a banner with that motto, "Por Bem." Whether the queen was convinced, we don't know. I suspect not. In another room blue-and-white-tile hunting scenes cover the walls, and the octagonal paneled ceiling is inlaid with seventy-two deer, each holding the arms of a n.o.ble family. Having said earlier that I'm not too inclined to tour castles and palaces, I find this one so odd and fascinating. Sintra has several other storybook castles. Someday I will bring my grandson to explore them, if he is interested in arcane knights and legends of buried gold. The Castle of the Moors at the top of the hill would be a great hike if it were not pouring rain. The crenellations slice across the sky, interrupted by merloned towers. Several other exotic palaces lend a fabled aspect to the hills.

I wonder where the English poet lived when he was here. Lord Byron, who really got around in his day, loved Sintra and penned a few lines about the town that are reproduced endlessly in guides and brochures. As one who likes to write about places, I have noticed how grateful towns are when they have been praised in print. Any little sentence from Goethe, Mark Twain, or Nathaniel Hawthorne, any couplet by Sh.e.l.ley, Keats, or Dante will be surely picked up and taken to heart forever. The Majorcans even revere George Sand, who described them in Winter in Majorca as brutish and backward.

It's easy to see why a poet would be drawn to this craggy and forested landscape of palaces, secret gates, views of the sea, and mysterious fog pulled in from the water by the hotter interior. Moisture drips from trees, and the air makes you want to inhale. Not as fashionable as it once was, Sintra still has its share of hidden estates and a few shops for clothes and home decor. Of course it has a good bakery, a perfect place to try the local specialty, queijadas de Sintra, cheesecake tarts with a scent of Moorish cinnamon. Ed wonders if we could take a box of mixed pastries home but, remembering the goatskins and bed linens, decides not. We walk back to the hotel, arriving totally drenched. Time to crack open that chilly bottle floating in melted ice and raise a gla.s.s. Because it is hard to imagine not always travelling, the Greek toast comes to mind: Live forever.

The plane from Lisbon to Rome is delayed two hours, and we have drawn seats in the rear. I'm squinched in the middle, and Ed is across the aisle in the window seat. A great deal of chaos goes on around us as people take seats wherever they want, ignoring a.s.signed seats. Everyone is speaking Italian. The flight attendants give up. As we take off, several people shout and scream. Ed and I look at each other: What's going on? As soon as the plane is aloft, everyone gets up, visiting, queuing for the bathroom, pa.s.sing fruit around. The seat belt sign comes on, and the plane starts to jounce. More screams, but no one sits down. So much is being handed back and forth. I am given food and photographs and postcards. The airline's processed sandwiches are greeted with loud cries of "Che schifo!" What s.h.i.t! We are right in the dead center of a group of rowdy southern Italians who have been on a pilgrimage to visit the shrine of Fatima. For most of them, this is the first flight. The party is on. I never have heard so much laughter-or any laughter-on a flight. The man next to me sees my amazement. "Signora, a little confusion is good for the heart." Ed collects several business cards and hears life stories. The pilot begins the descent into Fumicino, and the aisles remain jammed. No one can hear the voices on the speaker admonishing everyone to buckle their seat belts and raise their tray tables. Finally, the attendants start to shout and ride herd. The pilgrims remain quiet only for a moment. We're going home to Italy. Let the singing start.

s.p.a.ccanapoli Split Naples We stop to listen to four musicians who are playing Brazilian music with gusto. Suddenly, a couple steps away from our small crowd and begins to tango in the street. Naples. Where else in the world does someone tango in the street? Where else do you, too, want to break into a tango in the street? Others gather and clap and shout encouragement. We step back into a bar to watch while savoring the best coffee on planet earth. Concentrated and rich, the flavor bursts, then stays in your mouth. We love the local custom of serving a gla.s.s of water with coffee. Everyone seems to drink at least half the water. The reason must be to cool you because the coffee is served quite hot. Even the cup is hot to the touch, though the barmen pluck them easily from the racks set in boiling water. I must sip, but I see the Neapolitans step up to the bar, toss down the coffee in a nip, and exit.

A less-expert couple joins the dance. A little girl raises her arms and starts to wiggle. It's a party. Sometimes all of Naples seems like a party.

We first came here fourteen years ago and were impressed with the vibrancy of the city, awed by the archaeological museum, which houses the finds from Pompeii and Herculaneum, and seduced by the balmy weather. Traffic was memorable. Ed got to drive on the sidewalk. About four years ago we came back, and ever since, weekend by weekend, sometimes week by week, we began to explore the city and its environs. To know Napoli-once you've been, you never want to say Naples again-would take two lifetimes. This month we have two weeks. May is the ideal month for a visit because dozens of monuments and churches usually closed are open in the mornings. May is also the month for walking along the fabled bay. Those ancient Romans didn't miss an aspect of hill or curve of coast. They knew exactly where to site their country villas.

What you read about Naples, you have read over and over. Don't cross into this area, avoid that street, wear a money belt, leave your jewelry at home. Thieves, indolence, corruption, chaos, grime, and murder by the Mafia. Actually the Mafia is not interested in visitors, and the murder rate is considerably higher in most American cities than here. We're supposed to be afraid? We live in the Bay Area. I want to ask those writers who admonish you to beware of Naples: Heard of Oakland?

Writers repeat other writers, not noticing that Naples goes around all 360 degrees and that their impressions travel only about ten percent of the way. Travellers, those who've never been there and those who stayed one night en route to Amalfi or Pompeii, also repeat the well-worn words.

This began long ago. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travel writers scorched Naples with their prose. "Naples is a paradise inhabited by devils," goes an adage from back in the fourteenth century. The hot sun was blamed for eighteenth-century travellers' impressions of laziness. Is Naples hotter than the Cote d'Azur in August? All the writers could agree that Naples was the golden city, situated most fortunately of all cities on a luxurious sweep of calm blue bay, with Vesuvius and the long arm of the Amalfi coast to balance the composition. The volcano smoked, too, smoked most picturesquely, as the thousands of paintings of the bay attest. (It smoked until 1944, when an eruption sealed the opening.) For those leisurely Europeans on Grand Tour, Vesuvius added the dimension of primitive nature at work just at the edge of the seascape. The harbor view includes the felicitous isles of Procida, Capri, and from certain points Ischia. For the ancient people, the spot was first among the many choice locations in the Mediterranean world. For travellers during the Enlightenment, Naples both allured and revolted. The writers considered the poor of Naples to be mindlessly happy and/or extremely lazy. In an essay in Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, Melissa Calaresu has written well about these mostly French visitors in her essay "Looking for Virgil's Tomb." "One can say that idleness is the trait truly characteristic of the Neapolitan Nation," she quotes from Richard de Saint-Non. And she finds in Joseph-Jerome Lefrancais de Lalande's writing that the Neapolitan appears as "wicked, indolent, and especially inconstant." Calaresu describes the Neapolitan writers who fought back in print, accusing the French of pederasty, buffoonery, plagiarism, and ignorance, but the stereotypes of the eighteenth-century writers, especially Lalande and Saint-Non, endure to this day.

Often Italians also look down on the South, especially Naples. "Africa begins south of Rome," we've heard one time too many.

When I exclaimed over the gorgeous Raoul Bova, who starred in the movie of my book Under the Tuscan Sun, our friend Amalia shrugged. "He is not pleasing to me. Perhaps it is because he sounds like a Neapolitan."

As we left for this trip, Beppe, who tends our olives and vegetable garden, arrived with his weed-whacker. "We'll be back on the twentieth-we're going to Naples."

He set down his machine. "Napoli. Ehhhh. Son' tutti cattivi. Tutti." They are all bad. All.

A friend gave us a ride to the train. "Caos. Ladri." Chaos. Thieves. She held out her hand. "Leave that necklace with me."

"It's not even real-who's going to s.n.a.t.c.h it off my neck?" I kept the necklace.

The tango ends. We walk back to the funicular and ride up, straight up, to Piazza Vanvitelli in the new (nineteenth-century) Vomero district, where you lose entirely the raucous energy of Naples. Here you could be in Paris or Verona or any sophisticated city with leafy pedestrian streets lined with cafes, pastry shops, and small businesses of all kinds. The clothing shops are particular to the owner-no look-alike chains here. A group in the street plays-what?-marimbas near a fountain in the abstracted shape of Vesuvius. Water flows instead of lava. In an antique shop we begin to chat with the two owners, Fidele and Roberto, who operate the shop on weekends as a hobby. Their day jobs are internist and lawyer. We buy a small silver cup, and Roberto's wife wraps it as though it were an important gift. They are about to close for lunch, so we walk out with them, and they take us on a little tour of the area, including their own houses down a quiet street with views of the distant bay. We talk restaurants, opera, how Naples is changing. They invite us in for lunch, but we don't want to intrude if they are only being polite. Instead, we exchange numbers and plan on dinner another time.

We stroll on-vegetable shops where each asparagus looks squeaky clean and each lettuce like a spring hat. We pa.s.s friggitorie, the fried-food stores with tempting arancini (crisp rice b.a.l.l.s stuffed with cheese or meat sauce), fried pizza, and during this season fried artichokes-so very delicious. I smell the heaps of potato croquettes, and mozzarella in carrozza, mozzarella put in a "carriage" of milk-soaked bread and deep fried. The famous Tuscan crostini, rounds of bread for many delicious toppings, here are deep-fried disks of pizza dough, which are then spread or piled with whatever the cook fancies.

Vocabulary: pizzaiolo: a most important occupation, the pizza maker.

mozzarella di bufala: languorous water buffalo in the Campania countryside produce the milk for the cheese loved most in Napoli.

On this first day, we want pizza. The restaurant we choose says Dal 1914. If they've been making pizza that long, they must know how. The cook shoves them inside the wood oven as fast as he can roll the dough and throw on the tomatoes. Someone else brings them out with a long iron spatula. In the restaurant crowded with local families having Sat.u.r.day lunch, we are the only tourists. I order the cla.s.sic Margherita, and Ed has his favorite Napolitana, with anchovies and capers.

Neapolitan pizza Margherita is a thing unto itself: not too thin, not too thick; not confused with a lot of different ingredients; the just-right crust, a flaky bite yielding to a softer interior; the vesuviana tomatoes, the freshest mozzarella di bufala, and the hint of basil, bringing another touch of Mediterranean essence. The Margherita is a well-written ode to simplicity of ingredients in perfect balance of taste and texture. Often pizza restaurants offer only Margherita and Marinara, but usually you find pizza with escarole, which has been chopped and mixed with raisins, garlic, capers, and sometimes anchovies.

The walkway through the fecund and shadowy garden of Vomero's Villa Floridiana curves enough to make you feel you are in a vast park. The twists ensure that you come all of a sudden upon the elegant white neocla.s.sical villa. In the forecourt, families with babies lie on blankets, and the lawn is a riot of toddlers running, colliding, and being scooped up by their mamas. The eternal soccer game has begun, and the wonk of the ball and the shouts do not disturb a young couple practically making love on the gra.s.s nearby. The house is lovelier from the south side, with its long staircase and views across the gulf. This was a pleasure palace for Francesco I di Borbone and his wife, Lucia, d.u.c.h.ess of Floridia. They hired the Tuscan architect Antonio Niccolini, who designed an incarnation of the fabulous San Carlo opera house. He redesigned an existing villa and built in their gardens a private zoo, theatre, round temple, chapel, and fountains. When all the pomp reduced to circ.u.mstance, the state acquired the property, which became the home of the Duke of Martina's collections.

The guard and ticket seller seem happy that someone finally has come to view the villa's ceramic museum. I want to see the majolica and porcelain, both such strong local traditional arts. This collection, mainly from the eighteenth century, is idiosyncratic. A case of early forks with two sharp tines. A copper reliquary for the relics of Santa Valeria shows her being decapitated on the lid and on the bottom she hands her own head to a saint while the executioner prances away. So many fine items a collector would be thrilled to discover-just as the Duke of Martina did-at an antique market: Napoleon painted on parchment, dinner ware from the eighteenth-century Royal Porcelain Works of Naples, ivory and coral carvings, a tortoisesh.e.l.l lorgnette-all contribute to a sense of luxury and refinement that existed during the French Bourbon ascendancy in Naples.

Six thousand plates, vases, statuettes, urns, inkstands, snuffboxes later, we emerge and seek a particularly fragrant pastry shop we pa.s.sed earlier. We need sustenance before we return to the hotel for a few hours of reading and looking out from the terrace at the magical gulf.

The dolci of Naples deserve a book of their own. The French and Spanish heritages, combined with Italian culinary traditions, result in delectable trays of tasty morsels in thousands of shops and bars all over town. We limit ourselves to one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and only split a dessert at night. A little wisp of crunchy cannolo pastry slipped around almond cream, another cannolo stuffed with chocolate ricotta-what's the harm in that? Especially with another paradigm coffee-barely a spoonful, with a crema to coat the lips. Ed is fascinated to see that the espresso machines are, one and all, the pump kind. In Tuscany these have been replaced with push-the-b.u.t.ton models. "Oh, no, no," the barista tells him, "this way you can really tamp the coffee, and the lever pushes the water through it with more pressure." He points to a gauge and pulls down the lever. He throws up both hands, What can you do? "In Tuscany they drink brown water."

When we return to our room, the management has sent us a plate of sfogliatelle and a half-bottle of Villa Matilde wine. A sfogliatella resembles a clamsh.e.l.l half opened. The pastry, like millefleurs, is tender and layered. You bite into dense, sweet ricotta filling. This is one of the great pastries of the world. To prop oneself in a big bed with linen sheets, the windows open to the Briar Rose view of castle, volcano, gulf; to sip a little wine in the late afternoon and pick up one of these irresistibles-this is sybaritic. The Roman hedonists couldn't have enjoyed it more. We spread our maps, cross-reference restaurants in various guides, and make a list of all the treasures in Napoli that we want to see.

By the time we go upstairs to dinner, it's almost ten. But that's early in Naples, and others are arriving also. Since the evening feels too chilly for the terrace, we sit close to the windows so we can see the bobbing lights on fishing boats moving out into the gulf, and the pave of lights along the water's edge below. Vesuvius looms only as a dark presence in the distance. "Vesuvius," I say. "Just the knowledge of it must influence the minds of people who live here."

"Like San Francisco. At any given moment, all h.e.l.l could break loose." I know Ed is reliving the 1989 earthquake, when we fled from our house, which felt like a mouse being shaken in the mouth of a cat.

"At least here you could see it coming."

"But they died at Pompeii from the fumes and ashes. That must have happened as fast as an earthquake."

"I think there's something good, though."

"Well, yes, the tomatoes that grow on the slopes. And the grapes."

"Something else. Remember Blake talked about those who learned to walk on frozen toes? Neapolitani must get some energy, some heat for life from the earth. The caloric strength from underground enters their feet as they learn to walk, giving them more pa.s.sion and life force."

"It's a theory." Ed smiles. The waiter pours our second Villa Matilde wine of the day, and we toast the shadowy outline of Vesuvius.

s.p.a.ccanapoli-the street that splits Naples-symbolizes to me the many split aspects of the city: the sublime and the ugly, the ancient layers of time and the ordinary hustle of the present, the several cultures that shaped the local character (Italian, French, Spanish, and through them a touch of the Moors), the kindness of the climate and the fearful proximity of the volcano, the incredible luxuriant architecture and art and the crumbling, tumbled buildings, the fabulous sophisticated decorative tradition and the folk art religious figures and nativity scenes sold everywhere. This place splits and splits again. The careless beauty of Naples is impossible to contain in a book. The voltage of the city resembles New York's, but the American version is a commercial energy, a drive into the future, while Naples' electricity feels connected to largesse, zest for living, a s.e.xual, grounded force-and timelessness. To grow up here must make the rest of the world seem pallid.

Vocabulary: dec.u.mano: the Latin word for a major street. s.p.a.ccanapoli, an arrow-straight street piercing the heart of old Naples, was an important thoroughfare, the dec.u.mano inferiore, on the Roman town plan. Via Tribunali, parallel and close, was the dec.u.mano maggiore, and Via Anticaglia was the dec.u.mano superiore.

presepio: creche. The presepio tradition goes back centuries, and the antique clothed, terra-cotta figures, with expressive faces and the range of Neapolitan gestures, are searched for by aficionados of the tradition. Every citizen must have an ongoing collection. On the side street along the church, San Giorgio Armeno, I find a bevy of delicately painted pastel angels and buy a dozen for Christmas gifts.

scavo: archaeological excavation.

Paleochristian: earliest Christian remains.

corno: horn-shaped object carried, displayed, and worn as protection against the malocchio, the evil eye.

Enter s.p.a.ccanapoli, and you step onto the ancient Roman grid. The forum, the center of town, was uncovered in this area. Off s.p.a.ccanapoli are the narrowest streets on earth, lined with closet-sized artisan shops and little bottege whose entire stock you could fit inside two suitcases. The air above the street is alive with the flapping of laundry. I often stop at the top of a street because the dim light looks sinister. Via Tribunali and Via Anticaglia (which becomes Via S.S. Apostoli) are similar in feel to s.p.a.ccanapoli-scrunched and lined with palaces, dingy shops, and so many churches I can't keep them separate. Our route goes from Piazza Bellini over to Via Anticaglia, back along to Via Tribunali to the duomo, then cuts over to s.p.a.ccanapoli, where we will walk the length to Piazza Gesu. With meandering in between. We're focusing on these streets because along them, and jogging off here and there, are the monumenti, usually closed, now open on May mornings.

We get dropped off by the taxi at a piazza so Old World it makes you ache. Piazza Bellini seems to be dozing in another century. Decadent terra-cotta, ochre, mustard, and oxblood apartments and cafes circle an excavated Greek ruin, a man napping on a bench, a street lined with bookstores. We hear music here, there, everywhere-someone playing a time-warped violin in the morning, and from another window, a sad sax. We free-fall into a special ambiance we did not know existed but which seems so oddly familiar, so right. Old ladies stare from upper windows as though at something we can't see. Men are raising the saracinesche (the folding gates that close Italian shops retain the Saracen name of those who brought them to Italy) and opening the doors to their musical instrument and sheet music shops.

Map in hand, we find courtyards with open staircases zigzagging up four floors, lone palms, old-fashioned nuns in heavy black with crosses, priests in long robes, buildings faded and peeling, abandoned palazzos, a derelict yellow baroque church overtaken by pigeons. An extravaganza of tile covers benches, fountains, paths at the sublime cloister of Santa Chiara. The streets gyrate with daily commerce. And we find open churches! All week we will wander this route among arcaded markets with vegetables spilling out of boxes, fish in blue plastic tubs, cheap shoes, and presepio shops. Many of these sell handmade creche figures. Elaborate scenes involve not just the holy family, wise men, and angels-the whole context of a village is included. Small children are shopping with their parents. I see them buy miniature roof tiles, bread ovens, sections of buildings, artificial fires, tiny fruits in baskets. I collected for my dollhouse like that when I was a child. And everywhere the corno is for sale. Jewelry stores sell this protective symbol in coral, turquoise, and gold. The presepio shops sell them in terra-cotta and bra.s.s. "Do local people still believe that the corno keeps away the evil eye?" I ask in one shop.

The young man, who makes his own presepio figures, points to the tiny gold one on a chain around his neck. "We don't believe-but we wear. If you get a new car, a new motorcycle, anything new, you hang a corno. You hang a corno especially if you don't believe."

Ah, split Naples: s.p.a.ccanapoli.

San Lorenzo Maggiore, right in the heart of Naples, must be one of those inexplicable places where magnetic forces beneath the earth converge and pull you toward an invisible crux. It pulled Petrarch, who ran into the church from the rain-such an odd little bit of memory to survive. It pulled Boccaccio inside where he met his Maria, who became Fiametta in his writing. It pulls us away from the fatally picturesque piazza, framed by an arch over the street where the skill of the ten-year-old soccer players enables them to avoid hitting the crowded stands of corno, pulcinella, and presepio wares.

Lorenzo, patron saint of cooks, is one of my favorites. He is always shown holding a rack, on which he was roasted by his persecutors. He is said to have cried out, "Turn me over, I'm done on this side"; I don't doubt it. His restrained Gothic and very masculine church interests me primarily because it's the last layer of a series of previous embodiments. Excavations have shown that the Greek agora lies underneath, and the Roman forum was located nearby. The present church, a baby in historical terms, was built over the Paleochristian church on the same site. Some later baroque overlay has been removed, restoring the architecture to its unadorned simplicity. The Gothic is not common in Tuscany, so the architecture seems foreign, except for the marble columns and pietra dura inlay. Inside the door one of the memorialized dead carved in marble looks as if he's taking a siesta after lunch; another props up on his side, as if reading a mystery in bed. In the adjacent cloister and underground lie the remains of the Roman market. Then down a long flight of stairs, and you're suddenly walking along a whole section of Roman street. How spooky Neapolitans must have felt during the air raids of World War II, when they hid from bombs here. Cool, dank, dim-this is a cross-section of the past, with perfectly delineated shops. Like the ones still thriving above, they had one room for sales and a smaller one in back for storage, siesta, and eating. The paved street is about as wide as those that cut between the dec.u.mani. A section of arcades, too, mirrors the markets above ground. A bread oven, a cistern, a little pa.s.s-through window, a stone wash tub-these homey details recall daily life.

After all these marvels, my favorite part of San Lorenzo turns out to be in a wing of the convent, where I find two small rooms of medieval sarcophagi and marble tombstones carved with figures of the deceased. They are all men, probably much taller in death than in life. Each body rests his feet on two dogs like little cushions. The figures rest their heads on marble pillows, indented as though soft. Their hands are crossed in knightly poses, but one man's hands are together in prayer. The beauty of the carved marble invites the hand. When I rub mine over one face, I get a chill, as though the marble man could feel my touch. Long gone to dust, the idealized form remains.

Santa Maria del Purgatorio faces one of the arcaded markets. Grim bronze skulls and crossbones on stone pedestals mark the front entrance. You can see into a dim crypt below, decorated with olive oil cans full of plastic flowers. Standing across the street day after day, selling your produce and chatting with friends, you don't, I suppose, notice the grinning skulls staring at your radicchio.

Santa Maria di Costantinopoli must be the liveliest church in Napoli this morning. As part of the May openings, we are greeted politely by a boy from the convent school, who offers to show us the church. His teacher says buon giorno, too, and stands a few feet away to listen to her student practice his English. Soon we're joined by three girls. Is there anything lovelier than eleven- or twelve-year-old girls? Tossing cascades of black hair, flashing brilliant smiles, almost jumping with excitement, they all talk at once, telling us the church was built as a thank-you to Maria for stopping an attack of plague. But, one shouts, the church was supposed to have been built on promises given during an earlier plague, and the people forgot. That's why the plague came back; Maria wanted the church she'd been promised. They propel us to the convent garden where their cla.s.smates perform traditional music and dances with great enthusiasm. They refuse to believe that we understand Italian. "Nonstop music. You will listen." Songs involve cartwheels in the dirt, great work on the tambourines, and that quintessential local instrument, the triccaballacca, which rings bells and clacks at the same time. Pre-s.e.xy girls go all out to interpret romantic songs. Hands on hips, eyes rolling, lots of swaying-little innocent Carmens. "Which girl do you like?" I ask the boy. He turns his serious, deep Byzantine eyes to me and smiles. "Not one of these, but there are too many beautiful girls in my school."

The girls pull our sleeves, pointing out the spa.r.s.e and dusty laurel, bitter orange, mimosa, and mandarin trees, the tiled cupola of the church, and their school, which they so clearly love, ab.u.t.ting a desolate courtyard with broken chairs and trash. "Abbandonata," one shrugs.

They offer to show us the church again. When we thank them and say goodbye, each one politely shakes hands, then they're off.

"Pizza pause," Ed says as we leave. We stop in at Campagnola, the plainest of plain places, jammed with locals. The sign proclaims: Qui si mangia bene e si spende poco, here one eats well and spends little. This is down home; no guidebooks will point you here. Mama is cooking, and there's no pizza at all, but instead we are tempted by marinated sardines, grilled fish, marinated zucchini, and peperoni ripieni. Four tourists look in and recoil. But this many locals can't be wrong. Soon more crowd inside. The husband keeps grabbing folding tables and finding s.p.a.ce for them. No one minds because Napoli has the densest population in Italy; they're used to close quarters. When Mama comes by our table, I ask how she made the delicious peppers, which are not really stuffed but rather layered. "Roast the peppers and cut them in strips. Put them in a baking pan and sprinkle them with breadcrumbs, parsley, pine nuts, raisins, and a few pieces of b.u.t.ter, then do that again."

"No olive oil?"

"Of course olive oil. Swim in olive oil. Then you bake."

"That's all? Wasn't there some meat?"

"Si, come no? E forse un po' di formaggio." Yes, why not? And maybe a little cheese.

We start the long walk back to the hotel. We pa.s.s so many Santa Maria churches. Some are named for location: Maria of the arch, the portico, the column, the vista; some are named for memory: Monteoliveto, Jerusalem, a rare snow in summer. But by far most of Mary's churches' names reveal her deepest function to the faithful. She has her churches of miracles, pregnancy, help, concession, faith, patience, purity, health, victory, knowledge, hope, thanks, grace, every good, seven sorrows, and chains-dozens and dozens and dozens of places to appeal to Mary for what ordinary life requires. Her shrines in the street offer a spot to pin a note or a photo so that she will look down with mercy. We stop at all of them. She is outlined in three layers of neon. She is gazing all the way through you. She has a secret smile. One moving Jesus shrine has carved above its niche ADOREMVS in Roman letters. Jesus is crowned with thorns, ecce h.o.m.o, behold the man. His pain is completely surrounded by flowers. "Napoli overwhelms me," I say to Ed. "It's the full-fledged, all-out, big-hearted Mediterranean city."

"In fifteen years it will be the best city in the world to live in. It's got everything. Clean it up, yes. But I hope they leave the ruins, let it continue to run wild, too."

"As much as I love Rome, something about Napoli gets closer to me. I'd love to have been born here. More than anywhere else."

In the dim siesta light, with the shutters pulled almost closed, I read pages from The Gallery by John Horne Burns, a young American soldier stationed here during World War II. I pick up this book as I do Colette's Earthly Paradise, because it deeply refreshes. Besides being a clear imagistic writer, who seemed to write with blood instead of ink, Burns understood Italy. Even during war and occupation, even though he was very young, he connected at a cellular level. Having just walked through the gla.s.s-vaulted Galleria Umberto I, where his novel is set, I go back to him because of the tremendous love he brought to his writing. He recognized Napoli, and the city gave him an opening into understanding how those in tragic circ.u.mstances live and even find joy. His method is portraiture. In his pages we meet many American soldiers and many Neapolitans, all caught in stupidity and madness, all given the opportunity to reveal their souls. The ugliness and grace of human character stains and lights every page. On page 347 this description: Moe loved the city of Naples . . . Those corners that gave onto nowhere, the sunlight slanting on a pile of rubble, those faces looking out laughing or weeping at him-all reminded him that his heart was a hinge not a valve. And most of all he loved the t.i.tter or hum or roar of Naples, saying to him things older than 1944, things that reached back into a time when men were more united in their chaos, willing to be put against a wall for something they believed. It seemed to Moe that in Naples there had somehow survived the pa.s.sion and coherence of an old faith. All this he only felt, but the city of Naples comforted him. There was a poultice in its dirt, a natural humanity in its screaming.

Sunday. The city closes. Traffic abates. Families flock to Villa Reale park, where they visit with friends and leisurely walk along the water. The children ride long-maned ponies that are saddled or attached to little carts. Older children rush toward the b.u.mper cars. "They're practicing for adulthood," Ed says. And yes, the children drive with aggression and exuberance. A concert is in progress on the bandstand. We don't go in the aquarium, stocked with fish from the bay, but I love the story of the feast prepared for American generals when the city was liberated during World War II. The larders were bare all over the city, so a seafood dinner was prepared-from the aquarium.

A low-key antique market strings along the edge of the park on the second and fourth Sundays of the month. Vendors seem mainly to visit with other vendors. I pick up a silver saltcellar, and a florid-faced man with eyebrows as big as bird wings calls out, "Oh, lady, that was used by all the Borbone kings, and by Napoleon also." I pick up another. "Where are you from?"

"We live in Tuscany," Ed says.

"You are not Tuscan."

"No, americani."

"But you love Tuscany. You are very smart but not too smart. Tuscany is calm, but here"-his gesture takes in the bay-"here it more beautiful."

"Were you born in Napoli?" I ask.

"Signora, where else would I be born?" We buy two saltcellars after a little stint of bargaining that feels obligatory on both sides but useless because he hardly budges and the price was low anyway.

The centro closes to traffic today, giving us a taste of what a paradise Napoli would be if only cars could be brought under control.

Sunday is best. On domenica you don't feel obliged to go, go, go. A cafe will do, facing the Castel d'Ovo, the Egg Castle, with blinding light from the bay glancing on our faces. Behind sungla.s.ses we linger over espresso, talking about pizza as an art form, the geekiness of people's travel clothes, Shirley Hazzard's novel Bay of Noon, set in Naples, fried maccheroni cakes, and courtyards with marble busts and palms.

The day seems to last a week. A soft rain begins. We walk toward the archaeological museum as rain pelts down harder. Ah, Napoli-a city where not only is love king but you can find a taxi in the rain. The museum, what a gift, is almost empty. We linger in all the Pompeii rooms. A few years ago you had to have an appointment to see the so-called "p.o.r.nographic" paintings from the brothel at Pompeii. Now the door stands open. p.o.r.nography is supposed to be t.i.tillating; these paintings are simply funny. Someone's gigantic p.e.n.i.s must be carried on a tray before the man. There's a little b.e.s.t.i.a.lity, not too convincing. We move on to the silver rooms. Wine cups with the grapes in repousse and handles shaped like beaks of birds, bowls and cups with floral motifs, porridge dishes with short handles just adapted to the hand. These are decorated with hunting scenes, vines, and the head of Medusa. The cooking equipment could work in my kitchen today. Someone's square baking dish and saute pan lack only the nonstick coating. I wonder what was cooked in the m.u.f.fin tin with a handle. Maybe the vegetable timbals (sformati) we like so much in Tuscany are a precursor of the rich macaroni in pastry timballi from the local repertoire. As we always do when we are at this museum, we visit the famous mosaics from the courtyards and garden walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Then we see from the window that the rain has stopped.

Walking "home," we stop at the large Feltrinelli bookstore. Inside we hardly can move for all the people. I would like a Neapolitan cookbook. Ed veers off to find a CD of the traditional music of the area. We lose each other for a half hour because he moves on to poetry, and I start looking in the gardening section. This long gentle day with no push to see as much as possible must be similar to living here. The light on the water looks clean and silvery. Savory smells of roast pork drifting from windows clouded with pasta steam make me long for an invitation to dinner. I imagine living in an apartment with high ceilings and a geranium balcony opening to the view of islands and water. The bright colors inside are those of Matisse's Mediterranean room paintings. In the kitchen, small but with thick marble counters, Ed makes ravioli filled with borage and ricotta, while a pomorola (ultimate tomato sauce) simmers. We'll play some Villa-Lobos because it goes with the light Neapolitan air. A Sunday evening at home, when I will bake some olives with fennel seeds and lemon peel, fry a rabbit, and set the table near the balcony's open doors so that when Fidele and Roberto come over with their wives to eat, we can see the last moment of the sunset-perhaps even the green flash. I almost see the frosted gla.s.s cups of almond and melon gelato and taste the zeppole, those crisp fried cookies. But so far the only reality of this meal is the silver saltcellars I bought this morning, now wrapped in tissue in my bag.

We're content, after all, with a late dinner at a trattoria. Grilled artichokes, pappardelle, cut wider than usual, with roasted peppers, a mixed grill, and the local bread that is like firm cake. I think I can taste the freshness of the wheat. "Put the basket over there. I don't want it in my reach-what a disaster to love bread so much." Every night we are exclaiming over the food. "How can it be so tasty?" And the restaurants are lively with talk and music, for in Naples inevitably someone comes in to sing. Eating out becomes the occasion it was meant to be.

Our days fall into a rhythm. The churches begin to blur. The street food-how fantastic. We try all the ices, the fried macaroni pies and fried pizza, everything but the pigs' feet. We walk until the soles of my feet wear off. "Che palle!" a man yells at two boys on a Vespa going full throttle the wrong way down s.p.a.ccanapoli. What b.a.l.l.s! I notice that the local people give coins and talk to the Gypsies who beg. There are not many-my hometown, San Francisco, beats Naples a thousand times in the number of street people. The Gypsy women sometimes sit in groups with children, sometimes alone. We have been startled at the beauty of most of them, and their clothes don't look bad, either. They're not ignored; another hint of the beating heart of this city. Same with the Africans selling tissues and CDs and fake designer bags, and the Gypsy men who come through the restaurants selling flowers. They're doing a job, and they're treated politely. Ed always buys the flowers.

The streets-what madness! But after a few days here we realize that our perspective is definitely a foreign one. After a few taxi rides across town, Ed begins to notice that the other driver expects to be cut off and will not barrel into the side of the taxi. He watches the maneuvers with admiration. "Are they good!" he says, and keeps congratulating the driver: "Bravo, bravo." The U-turns in the middle of streets, which make me clutch Ed's arm, are calculated. If there are four seconds or so before oncoming traffic reaches the driver, he will turn, knowing the approaching cars will brake for him. If there are only two seconds, he will wait. There's ch.o.r.eography to traffic flow. Finally I relax, even when we swerve by a woman with her groceries, baby, and toddler balanced on a Vespa, then an ancient couple on canes, even the traffic cop. About half the time we are overcharged in taxis, but not much, and the detours are interesting. All the drivers like to talk, and we initiate conversations in order to hear the fast, clipped dialect. At tight, tight turns-there are many-everyone gets in on the act. Shop workers emerge to give directions, someone a.s.sumes the role of director of the scene, pa.s.sengers get out of backed-up cars to see what's happening, ten people are gesturing with abandon, and inch by inch, with shouts from everyone, the car turns the corner without sc.r.a.ping the BMW left in the way.

The long afternoons are for our room. I write a little, read, take baths. Late, we walk out again, go to Capodimonte Museum, a castle, or San Martino for the splendid view and a look at the vast presepio collection in elaborate presentations. Whole villages are re-created, with the nativity one activity of many. When we leave there, all the faces we meet look like the presepio figures we've just seen. The walk down from San Martino must be one of the world's longest flights of stone steps-building them rivals the Pyramids. Every night we get to eat! In Napoli! We're never home before twelve or one, when we fall into deep sleeps packed with dreams.

While I'm packing to leave, the maid comes in. Ed slipped out early to take a last turn around the neighborhood. I am in the web of a dream-I'm steering a boat, almost flying over the bay, and a ginger cat sits on my shoulder. I have my sights on-where?