13. And she talks!

The weather in the south has been a touch on and off (that is sun and cloud rather than sun and rain) meaning that today's ocular wear is designed to compensate for the varying degrees of sun. For that reason, we've gone foe the eye patch, as pictured, and as worn by pirates and bon viveurs throughout the centuries.

But onto Italy. Regular readers will be aware that I was in the middle of nowhere, trying to make polite, conversation with my local liaison in Benevento. Up to yesterday, communication was proving most difficult, with short responses of 'yes', to the most engaging of of opening gambits, like "I hear rain is forecast...". My challenge was to get more than mono-syllabic utterances out of the teacher, and my work finally paid off. On the final day, leaving the hotel with my bags Marie asked where I was going to next. "Naples", I said. "Aghhhh. Napoli. Is a crazy place. I can'ta standa ita". This was the opening I was looking for. A few light questions about the traffic and rubbish problem brought forth a whole internal dialogue about problems with driving there and the noise, pollution, etc.

Having exhausted the topic of pollution, I thought I'd go out on a limb:

Ben: But as I was leaving the hotel, I noticed the small of the wild rosemary from the local church [check me!]

Marie: Ahhhh. Rosemary. It's so beautiful! I looooove the smell of rosemary. [etc. etc.]

As it happens, I stumbled across to topics in a single car journey after having endured none for the previous two days. Success was achieved.

While planning how I could continue the conversation on the return leg, I learnt that it would be a different teacher driving me back to the station. This didn't concern me, as my goal had been achieved. At least it didn't concern me until I got into the car with the driver. The woman seemed to have as much control over the car as a seven-year-old with an Alsatian. While trying not to make my concerns felt about over taking on corners, drifting onto the wrong side of mountain roads and simply failing to brake until being within metres of traffic ahead, the teacher sometimes tried to engage me. How the tables had turned. The conversation wasn't the problem, but the fact that when the teacher turned to speak to me, she also pointed the car in the same direction, was. Especially when there was oncoming traffic and it was only a sudden lurch back to the left that averted certain death or serious injury. To add insult to near injury, the teacher had Elton John on the stereo, too. I don't know if it was for her benefit or mine, but I certainly wasn't going with the whole 'Hakuna Matata' on that trip. Good gad.

Anyway, obviously I survived and got back to Naples for a final day of examining, only to have to fail a load of candidates who couldn't understand what I was saying. The fact that lots of people fail when I've had a bad night's sleep is starting to seem to me more than just coincidence... Nevermind.

The picture of the arch you see above is one of the school wheat models made for the annual wheat festival I mentioned in the previous blog. By clicking on the image and enlarging it, you too will be able to see the fabulous detail the locals have put into this truly organic masterpiece.

Anyway, tomorrow it's the early train to Rome and the final blog installment. Bet you can hardly wait.

12. Cakes, cars and the Fonz.

Just a quick one today, Carry On jokes aside. 'Notable' points from today:

1. Got cakes. Delicious, if a touch on the heavy side in the heat (7 1/2 / 10)

2. Got a piece of shaped straw (seen next to cakes and looking like a Chinese finger puzzle) called a 'scooby-doo'. Used as the basis for straw modelling (wonderful place, the countryside) for floats during the annual Wheat Festival. I would suggest coming to the festival in August [pictured], but I think I already know what your reply would be.

3. Went to the modern art gallery and saw a dozen pictures that could all be called 'Grey Shape on Dark Surface'. Beautiful.

4. Saw a small Fiat. Look! I'm there beside it.

5. Saw the Fonz. These days he says, 'Yo!' instead of, 'Heeeeeeeey!' Times, they are a changing.

6. Now packing for the seething metropolis that is Napoli.

Penultimate blog to come. Enjoy the pics.

12. Things to do in Benevento when you're still alive

It’s the hottest day of the tour so far (coming in at 33 degrees) and to celebrate the fact, we’ve got some high spec specs for today’s featured blog. The classy numbers pictured are the Infamous Italian Polarised Sunglasses by Arnette. Quite the thing, no?

Before I go onto Benvento, an update on the gambits I’m employing to lure the local teacher liaison (Marie) into conversation during the 20-minute drive to and from the examining centre. I was feeling a little tired this morning (strange dreams about houses in Blackpool preventing a thoroughly decent night’s sleep) and so wasn’t up to the challenge quite so much. I did, however, start with an old favourite: the weather. It was already pretty hot at 08:30 and so I thought I’d remark upon this and ask how long the weather would hold. The answer I got was, “yes” [stop]. Now, there can be several explanations for this:

1. The teacher’s grasp of English is so poor that she just feels all she can say is ‘yes’, in an effort to cover up her ignorance [this I don’t believe, as she’d explained some examining information to me the day before in sufficient upper-intermediate detail]

2. She was tired of my gambits and was just replying ‘yes’ in an effort to accommodate my relentless baiting for conversation [this I also don’t believe, as the ‘yes’ responses started from the very first gambit, and she could hardly have got tired of me before I started speaking, could she?]

3. She wasn’t listening.

If it was the third option, then I really was in for an uphill struggle, as first I’d have to get her to listen before I could even engage her in the sparkling small-talk that was scintillating in the discourse before her. And so the journey to the centre was passed in silence, with only a passing question about the unusual architecture of a passing church. The response was so passing that it could’ve been passed without notice. The return leg prompted her to ask about the candidates. Obviously worried about their performance, she let me know that it was the students’ choice rather than the teachers’ to decide who should be entered for the exam. Not that it really mattered, as after 5 ½ hours of the same grade, my mind had ceased to function (like the pictured cat's) and I could only think of yellow flowers as I dribbled spasmodically out of the corner of my mouth and onto my collar. Why yellow? I cannot say, I only know that I had an awareness of the fact that everybody had passed; although an awareness was all it was.

I did ask about Benevento and what one could do with a few hours spare and the response was brevity itself. You can look at the arch [pictured], the anfiteatro [long since closed and not accessible] or go to the museum [always closed]. There was, however, a modern art museum near the park, should I be interested. I feigned interest, just to be polite, but I think the chances of looking at some splodges of snot on a maroon canvas are between non-existent and pretty remote. However, I do have a half day tomorrow and as I’ve already taken in both the arch (both at day and night) and the anfiteatro (from a distance), it seems there’s little else in the sightseeing catalogue to do.

However, for those of you not able to get here, I've learnt that the ever caring British kindly relieved the locals of some of the reliefs from the arch and removed them to the British museum - well, it's only polite to help others look after their own history, wouldn't you say? What a relief!

I could, of course, just sit out on the roof terrace and read while knocking back the local Peroni [as you see pictured]. I’ve already spent a good amount of time doing this as it affords a valuable opportunity to dry one’s clothes (see shirt hanging up behind me), and nibble on some snacks from the local supermercato, thus saving the trouble of having to go out to a restaurant for lunch / dinner yet again.

Another option is to spend some more time with the other examiner staying here. Yes, there’s another one here too. When I first arrived, I was sure the hotel was completely empty bar for me. However, breakfast revealed a Trinity examiner in his first year. From his wild-eyed look and trembling hands, I gathered at once that he’d been alone here for some time. This deduction turned out to be correct and so, wishing to be sociable, I arranged dinner that evening with him, whereupon we set out to a local trattoria for evening sustenance. While we did polish off a couple of bottles of the house white between us, he did strike me as being a little less on the enthusiastic side of life / work than other examiners I’ve encountered on this tour. Still, everybody likes to have a good whinge about life, work, transport, countries, bosses, the weather, , inter-planetary motions, the universe, etc. every now and then, especially when facilitated by house white. Lovely. Can't wait till tomorrow night. I wonder if there are any there are any topics left - perhaps I can try a few conversational gambits...

So there we have it. Benevento. I’m sure there’ll be more to write about tomorrow while there’s free internet access available here at the hotel.

11. The hills are alive with the sound of...

As we reach up into the hills of the Apennines, today’s sunglasses would reflect the need for higher altitude production and would be a mountainesque-type. However, technology and my abilities aren’t coinciding today, so you’ll have to imagine some kind of Sir Edmund Hillary affair with icicles forming on them and the like. But let’s move on from my inabilities.

So here we are in Benevento, far, far away. To be honest, the only things I knew about this place were gathered from the Lonely Planet guide book – a sometimes helpful and oftentimes dubious source of information. Experienced users of the guide will no doubt be used to reading between the lines when it describes a particular location. The Lonely Planet guide says:

“Despite the ring of drab modern housing that announces Benevento, the city, nestled in the green hills, boasts a lovely city peppered with remnants of its ancient past”

Reading between the lines, you get:

“It’s far away and difficult to negotiate without private transport. There are a few old city walls which haven’t been concreted over”

Lonely Planet goes onto say:

“The town was heavily bombed in WWII and the Romanesque cathedral had to be largely rebuilt”

Translate this into:

“All the old stuff has been destroyed, but there’s some new concrete stuff where the old used to be.”

The final line in the ever helpful guide tells me:

“The main church adjoins what was once an abbey but now houses a collection of 1st century remnants dedicated to the goddess Isis.”

Which means:

“There’s a church with a small museum which has some broken pottery plates in it.”

OK. That’s Benevento. But, to be fair, the surrounding hills are particularly picturesque, as can be seen and there’s an old Napoleonic arch, celebrating Italy’s invasion (is that right?). It may have taken 1 ½ hours to get here by train from Naples (although it wasn’t travelling very fast in case it might’ve hit something) but once you are here, the relief from the pollution of Naples is significant - I no longer feel as though I have to cough up the burnt rubbish I breathe when I stroll through the town – surely a boon.

And while I was thinking that nothing could happen here, just last night while taking a pre-bed stroll, I literally happened across an annual religious festival, complete with a huge array of monks, nuns and even a bishop or possibly a cardinal – tough to tell, although he was looking particularly pious. Either way, it’s certainly the greatest number of monks and nuns I’ve ever seen in a single place; there were monks in black, grey, white and brown and if that’s not worth writing about then surely nothing is. There’s got to be a joke about monks in there somewhere, but if there is, I’ve yet to work it out – look out in later blogs to see if a less drunken mind can piece a one together... Anyway, loads of folk were genuflecting before him but, not wishing to betray my British roots, I just took pictures of the spectacle.

Not sure what was going on, I asked the teacher liaison at today’s school. She wasn’t sure either. Apparently this kind of religious thing happens each year. She tells me she’s not very religious. And being Italian as well.

This information was about the most I got from the liaison (Marie) all day. She seemed to specialise in not saying very much, which doesn’t bode well for her students taking higher grades, where there have to converse readily with me. In a rare treat, this week, I’m being picked up each morning from the hotel to travel for 20 minutes buy car to a village on the side of a mountain. The views are tremendous, but the small talk leaves much to be desired.

As you can imagine, spending 20 minutes in a car requires some sort of conversation, especially from someone like me, and so I thought I’d start with a conversational gambit about the weather:

Ben: It’s a lovely day today!
Marie: Yes. [stop]

Waiting for more and getting nothing, I thought I’d try again, this time being more complimentary:

Ben: The countryside here is beautiful!
Marie: Yes, it is. [stop]

Enduring a few more minutes’ silence, I thought I’d try one more time, this time being a little more specific, trying to indicate particular interest and therefore particular comment about the local environment:

Ben: It seems to be quite agricultural round here...
Marie: Yes. [stop]

There were a few more attempts like this that also failed and also on the journey back to Benevento with equal success, or rather lack of it. There’s bound to be an ‘in’ somewhere, which will generate conversation but I have clearly yet to find it. This has no become my challenge to be overcome. I’ve three more days or journeys there are back again (totalling 120 minutes) and I feel I must be able to strike up a conversation somehow. I’m sure it’s never this difficult when I’m drunk and getting a dodgy minicab back from central London.

So, this is Benevento. There’s actually more to write about but as time is limited, that’s all for today’s instalment. Look out for some more tomorrow!

10. Capri sun

Saturday 24th was a day of sun, and being it a Saturday, it was also a holiday. To celebrate the day off in the sun, today's featured sunglasses are these particularly stylish ladies' ones known as Fashion Capri Suntanbrown which can be bought on sourcingmap.com. Just the thing to complete that summer look for all those aspiring young women out there.

So with the sun behind me, off I set to Capri, the famous island of film stars in the sun. One of the candidates I was examining told me that it's where all the "important people go". Upon clarification, I learnt that 'important people' included Brad Pitt. Good to see where priorities lie.

I'd tried to get to Capri the week before but was unsuccessful because I slept in and had a very leisurely breakfast instead. I think the same fate may have befallen me if it wasn't for the fact that I was in company this time and was obliged to make an early breakfast of 08:30. And what does the 'O' stand for? The pair I was travelling with were another examiner (Ann) and her friend who'd flown in from Syria, Jules. You can see us on our walking tour, which took in a good part of the island.

The tour itself was know to Ann, a hiker by hobby, as one which had only recently opened and was supposed to be the talk of the hiking community. Being told that it was only an hour in length, Jules and I felt quite up to the task. Four hours later, we were less convinced. Suffice to say, we walked around half the island and were desperate for beers at the end. The walk just went on and on at and our mouths, having used up our meagre supplies after a couple of hours, were dry as you like. It got to the stage of feeling like Ice Cold in Alex. So when we did finally get to the end of the route and discovered a bar, we weren't slow in drinking 3 beers each and some water. So, 9 small bottles of beer in total and a bottle of water: the price? €50. Of course, it's holiday town and prices are reflected accordingly. However, because of the extreme thirst, €5 a beer was a small price to pay. Perhaps more alarming is the fact that I was wearing shorts. I coped but I'm sure I put a few locals off their paninis.


Interestingly for me, the walk took in five old British forts, which were taken by Napoleon's forces in 1808. I knew a little about the forts and the battles when the forts were taken and started to enlighten my companions. While I can say that my enthusiasm for the topic carried them a certain way through my tale, I had hardly got onto Governor Hudson Lowe when their eyes started to glaze over. I thought it best to leave it there and let them get back to children and accessories, with a special focus on bags and rings. I just can't understand why they weren't more interested. Quite strange.

Not only did the walk take in the forts, but also the famous Blue Grotto [pictured] and a variety of stunning coastal views, including numerous little coves with folk in boats frolicking in the sea and sun. All very jolly.

All spent, we returned to Naples, only to discover that there'd been riots / clashes with police over the rubbish problems <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7418558.stm>. I don't know, go away for a day and look what happens.

Either way, I have left the city and its waste disposal problems behind and have gone 70km north east to Benevento. Restaurants, arches and religious processions all feature in the following blogs...

9. Urban Hymns

We’re going undercover today, meaning that today’s featured sunglasses are designed to make you blend into a typical Italian suburban crowd while picking up all that goes on around you. That’s why I’ve gone for the sunglasses with secret bilateral cameras brought to us by chinavasion.com. Guaranteed to make you look as Italian as the next man (as long as they’re wearing the same sunglasses) and a snip at €255.22.

But onto business. A rather industrial blog today. After failing 70% of my elementary candidates today (a rather higher percentage than normal, which I in no way put down to a bad night’s sleep) I thought I could do with a bit of a pick me up and so reached for a beer from the mini-bar. Lovely. As I was opening it, I cast an eye out of my hotel window and glanced over to a secluded spot behind the railway shed that my window happens to overlook. To my surprise, there were two youngsters indulging in more of a pick me up than a beer from the mini-bar, as you can see. The zoom was on max and my window was a little dirty, but you can certainly make out which punter has just been shooting up (his arm is extended). The other one looked rather anxious and was searching the ground for some time, seeming to have lost something valuable. After a while, his friend helped him out with something and they wandered off.

While ‘people of the street’ often get a bad rap for being degenerate, uneducated and generally unpleasant, there are brighter sides to the story. While passing some time reading in a sun-lit piazza recently, I noticed this gentleman [pictured] sitting opposite me. He had a huge bag of collected newspapers (surely the only person collecting any rubbish in Naples at the moment) and was taking his time going through them all, carefully folding up and keeping the interesting articles and discarding the ones he didn’t like into a third bag, presumably to be thrown away. All this while listening to an old transistor radio set playing classical opera. The batteries were almost out and the reception was a touch on the dodgy side, but this was advantageous as it meant that out of a radius of 2 metres, you could barely hear a thing. Melvin Bragg would be proud.

And onto trains, or at least the underground. As you will know, the underground in London has some strict protocol: stand on the right, let others off the train before you board, move down between the seats, etc. Having started to use the Neapolitan underground again, I’m reminded of the protocol here: shoulder barge people out the way in order to get onto the train first. This experience, while at first appearing quite aggressive, has the bonus of being quite liberating. You don’t have to apologise, as no one else will, and you don’t have to wait. If you like, it’s a kind of survival of the fittest. The downside is that it does take longer to board a train as the people trying to get off don’t have a clear lane and the people trying to get on just get jammed while crowding on. A blurred, action picture of one such underground train, looking to all intense purposes like a normal train, can be seen here.

And then there are other forms of transport in the city. I won’t bother you with buses but will jump straight to the funicolare. What might that be? Well, according to the directions to get to one school, it said I had to get one and being unsure I checked in my Italian/English dictionary. The translation: funicular railway. This didn’t help much. I don’t know, maybe I was just being dense, but as it turned out, it was a kind of train on a big escalator. See the picture. Quite convenient when you don’t want to walk up a hill. Anyway, this and other forms of transport can all be had for the sum of €1.10 for 90 minutes on any combination of local public transport. What London Underground’s excuse is for £3 for a single, I can’t fathom.

Anyway, time draws on and it’s time to celebrate it being Friday. Many of the local examiners are off tomorrow morning so we’re off for a tasty bite to eat and plenty of delightful red wine. I’m sure that’ll be a fine way to relax, but if not, at least I know there’s the railway shed across the way for extra resources should they be needed...

As for tomorrow, weather and inclination permitting, it'll be a trip to the island of Capri, where I hope to visit the world famous car factory.

8. Another sausage, Herr Visitor?

I notice on international weather forecasts that London is enjoying some rather fine weather at the moment. I can’t say the same for Naples. However, the rain continues to prevent the evening ritual of ‘burning the rubbish’. Mind you, Premier Berlusconi was in town today and the centre suddenly became clean – I gather it’s been shipped out to the suburbs. Anyway, if you were in London rather than Naples, you might have worn today’s featured sunglasses the Spy Optics Abbey sunglasses. Find out more about them at rsm.com.

The examining continues to be unremarkable. I’ve had a load of low level candidates the past few days, which means that if I say, “What colour is this?” one more time my brain will fuse, melt and then slowly dribble out of my nose. The recent highlight was when one eight year old, clearly bluffing it, backed herself into a metaphorical corner and admitted that she had a pet dog when she didn’t. We were then trapped on a course we couldn’t possibly deviate from:

Ben: What’s your dog’s name?
Candidate: Er... ‘Lucky’.
Ben: And how old is Lucky?
Candidate: Er... 52.
Ben: Goodness. He is lucky, isn’t he?

Onto a more pressing matter, cakes and lunches are not forth coming. Must be because I’m in the city. I’m back out in the provinces next week, so hopefully there’ll be some rural hospitality to write about there.

With a little spare time in the late afternoon, I thought I might try a little sightseeing and what with the weather, I thought I might venture underground. And this is where it gets a little interesting. In the IVth century BC, when the town was in its infancy, the Greeks excavated tufa stone from the deepest, darkest underground to build the city walls and buildings [as our picture shows]. These quarries became tunnels and then aqueducts, filtering two rivers into, or rather under, the city to supply the residents with water. With Emperor Augustus, the tunnels continued, creating 400km worth of aqueducts, some of which are 40 metres below the streets of Naples. Closed in 1884 because of an ill-timed outbreak of cholera (when is it well-timed?), they were opened again in 1942 for the locals to use as air-raid shelters when the allies thought they’d bomb the city a bit before ‘liberating’ properly. I say ‘a bit’, but the helpful guide informed me that Naples was the 5th most bombed city in Europe (Can you guess the first four? Answers on a postcard and a winner to be announced later).

The tunnels are a mix of wide, cavernous spaces for water storage and quite narrow, yet high, passageways (40 cm wide but seven metres high in some places). For a fit, dashing young man like myself, this didn’t pose a problem, but it was the large German gentleman in attendance who may have been to one too many Oktoberfests and eaten a few hundred too many sausages that faced a bit of a squeeze and was, I believe, swearing on more than one occasion as he struggled with his widened girth through the subterranean route. You can see such passageways in the picture. A bit tight, no?

But onto the English-speaking guide for the underground tour. There are regular English language tours, which was helpful for me, but not so helpful for the other eight on the tour, all of whom were German. Thank goodness we didn’t lose the war. The guide, Alex, picked me out early on as an English speaker (not hard as I was the only one) and proceeded to tell me how, when younger, he’d lived next door to a visiting family from Brighton, which was when his interest in English started. He’s a university student whose goal is to work and live in London – how the grass is always greener - who’s actually studying English accents and dialects. He told me he was trying to write a thesis on Scouse English, but he was having trouble understanding what the genteel folk from Liverpool were saying. I could only empathise and offer my commiserations on the chosen topic.

Alex was keen, chatty and enthusiastic, making the perfect guide. While being terribly enthusiastic, he did have a problem with volume and personal space, as I’ve noticed some people here do. While quite keen to engage in conversation before the start of the tour, I couldn’t help but notice that unnecessary attention was being drawn to us by his loud discourse style, even though he was standing so close to me that I had to crane my head back just so I could see him clearly. The problem was that the quieter I spoke, to try and avoid notice, the louder he got in attempts to compensate. As a wall prevented me from backing away any further, I gave up, and quietly mumbled my way through the conversation, although I fear I may have come across as being sullen as opposed to just trying to be inconspicuous. Anyway, he was a nice chap who was graced with a fine, imposing Roman nose – unfortunately, the nose didn’t match the rest of his face which was a little smaller in proportion, thus rendering the nose not a little out of place. Still, damn fine guide for a wide, open space above ground.

When returning from the tour, I noticed one of the many religious alcoves / shrines that dot the walls of the old town. This one struck me as being particularly graphic as you can see. While we have Christ on the cross, we also have a scene including perdition’s flames lapping around the unrepentant in eternal damnation in a subterranean hell. Don’t you just love the Catholic Church? Trying to identify the four figures in flames is rather like a religious version of identifying the figures on the Sgt Pepper’s album cover. While there’s definitely no Elvis or Marilyn Munroe, I’m sure that’s Mao on the far left. To be honest, Jesus doesn’t look too happy about his location either – must be to do with that rather inconvenient situation about being nailed to a cross.

Anyway, delights to look forward to in the next blog include survival tips when using the Naples underground and the local examining troupe I’m having dinner with.

7. The city burns!

As I write this things look bleak. I'm down to my last mouthful of beer and it's pouring with rain outside, meaning that instead of a sortie to the beer shop, I may have to resort to room service and the premium of convenience. Either way, to celebrate the heavy rain and the lack of burning rubbish, today's sunglasses that would be foolish to wear (because of the lack of sun and because they do look a bit silly) are the alien, made by Newwearing, an 'up and coming' maker of designer glasses.

So Naples. It's been a year since I was here and I really thought I'd remembered what it was like. I remembered the lively hustle and bustle, the parking in the middle of streets, the street vendors flogging Sony Viaos and mobile phones and even the uncollected rubbish. So this was what I was expecting when I got off the train from the quiet oasis that was Caserta. What I found was what I'd remembered, only more so.

The uncollected rubbish problem has got worse and the smell is quite unbearable in some parts. With rubbish piled up on street corners, it's a common site to see pedestrians walk by with tissues / garments over their noses. I hear it's worse in the suburbs where there aren't any tourists. Bus drivers are threatening to go on strike because in some places four lane roads are down to one lane owing to a build up of rubbish. There're also the regular burnings. On Sunday alone, two vast piles were set ablaze. One I witnessed at close range (the remains of which with new rubbish on top and charred bins can be seen here) with flames reaching 30 feet. The picture doesn't look much here but unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me during the actual burning. It really was big. Believe me. The second I could easily make out from my hotel window - over 500 metres away.

And 'Where are the fire brigade?', you might wonder. Well, so did I. Surely huge fires in public squares filled with cars, people and flammable material would warrant a visit from the fire putter-outers. Well normally it would, but I saw on the news that they were all busy in the suburbs putting out the burning rubbish mounds there. Still, at least it cleared the roads and allows people to hang out their washing [see final picture below].

But on I go about the rubbish when this is a side issue. All I mean to say is that it's got worse, but everyone kind of accepts it. I've even stopped noticing it. As it's everywhere you just take it as normal and get on with it. A bit like signal failures on the Tube, I suppose. But along with that there's the lively joie de vivre of Naples and the seeming understated sense of agreed chaotic anarchy that everyone just seems to get along with. Before I came out, a colleague was singing the praises of Naples calling it the most South American city in Europe. Not having been to South America yet, I can only guess what it's like, but if early memories of Herbie Goes Bananas are anything to go by, then he's right. Only fewer Volkswagons and more Fiats. What a place.

One of the hardest things to get used to here is crossing the road. There are pedestrian crossings but no one seems to use them. The standard procedure to cross the road is just to walk out in front of traffic and blithely hope for them to stop in time. The best I can liken it to is the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where Jones is about to pass the penultimate test to get to the Holy Grail and has to step out into a chasm, believing an unseen path to be there. It's kind of the same. You can easily spot visitors not used to the system as they stand at the side of the road waiting ages for cars to stop - which they almost never do, except when they're parking in the middle of the road, which is when they'll use their hazard lights. But only once they've stopped. Can you imagine what would happen in the UK if you did any of this?

Anyway, Naples is Naples and there are some jolly things to see and do, some of which I'll write about tomorrow or after.

On the examining front, no cakes or snacks yet this week. I did get coffee and water, though. Times are hard. Still, a different examining centre tomorrow so I'm ever hopeful. I'm also staying in a hotel with four new examiner recruits. One recognised me at breakfast yesterday (as I was quickly filling up on scrambled eggs before dashing for my bus) and before I knew it, I had four women, who were about to embark upon their first day's examining, surrounding me (not such an uncommon experience, obviously), three of them rather senior in years (more uncommon, I also hope, obviously). If it hadn't been for the fact that they were questioning me on exam procedure, I'd have thought I was trapped in some kind of P G Wodehouse episode surrounded by vicious aunts. Thankfully there've been no accidental engagements yet. Still, the night is young and the stars romantic, etc, etc.

On a final note today, for those that were wondering, I did call room service as it's still raining.

6. And it shines!

To celebrate the fine weather that graced us on Satruday, today's featured sunglasses are something a little special, they're the Black Rim Star sold by Luxurydivas.com at just $4! It's amazing what bargains you can find online.

So Saturday came and my wish for sun and hot weather was finally fulfilled. After a winter of weathery discontent, a real scorcher was delivered, and not on a school day but on a Saturday. Unbelievable. Getting my pack lunch of a few beers, some prosciutto and some cheese together, I set of to the royal Bourbon Palace. The Palazzo Reale is the largest palace in Europe and was commissioned by King Charles VII. I’m not saying he had an ego problem or anything, but he really went out of his way to out-do Versailles commissioning the largest building in 18th century Europe. I mean, what are you going to do with 1,200 rooms? I live in a five bedroom flat (including bathroom and kitchen) with my brother and that works well enough although it can be a little bit close when having visitors, but really, how many family members did this guy think he was going to have to put up at Christmas? The clue to the size, might be in their girth as I soon discovered.

I did a little internet research into these Bourbon sorts and found out some interesting gems. It might not come as much of a surprise, but did you know that the only reason they came to power was owing to the discovery and import of Chocolate in the 16th century? The story goes that once they started importing the foreign delicacy, the Italian elite couldn’t get enough of it and started to pay through the nose for any chocolate they could. The master stroke came when [soon to be] Charles V married one of the local royals who had a sideline in biscuits. It’s from this that the famous Bourbon biscuit was born (the advent of the Garibaldi biscuit is another, but separate biscuit episode in Italian history, as is the Nice biscuit, which as you know hails from France and is also quite nice with tea). Anyway, marriage and wealth led to the throne and then the palace you see pictured. The current biscuit design is a representation of this very palace, with each of the little holes / dimples on the biscuit representing some of the 1,790 windows in the Bourbon family ‘jewel in the crown’. Wonderful thing the internet.

His son, Fatty ‘who ate all the biscuits’ Ferdinando II (the subject of a later ABBA song) was even more ill at ease with himself, leading to the adaptation of the throne room into the modest chamber you see pictured. His wife wasn’t too much better on the size front either, eating rather too many biscuits than might be considered healthy. Here you can see a ceiling representation of the slim-line queen looking at her reflection in a biscuit tin lid, the slightly concave shape of the lid making her seem a little on the slimmer side in the reflection [click on it to make it bigger] – an early day ‘house of mirrors’ you might say. Or maybe not.

So here I was, enjoying the sun and the great gardens of the palace, which can only really be described as ‘palatial’. I felt like Dan Cruikshank going ‘around the world in 80 gardens’ (see BBC TV) taking in the splendours of the intricate water features and sculptures that adorn the 2-km long vista. Quite the ticket in the sun, I can tell you. My picnic was a welcome break at the halfway stage and beers and heat even necessitated a little snooze – even more the ticket.

And so we have the Saturday – a joy to relax and forget about the week’s examining. And then came Naples in the evening. Naples, Naples, Naples [said in growing exasperation].

5. Those emperors, eh?

Today it was sunny as I arrived at the school and at 13:30, when I was all said and done, it was still sunny! Remarkable. Had there been a vendor I'd wanted to part a good deal of cash with to look appropriately Italian, I might have been persuaded to purchase a pair of today's featured sunglasses : icandi by Topperliquidators. The name and the company all sound a bit virtual and terminator-ish to me.

But that Emperor Hadrian, eh? He's a one, isn't he? If he's not throwing up walls or laying down bits of Appian Ways, he's only knocking up huge, great, big colosseum things in the middle of nowhere, isn't he? Well, I say the middle of nowhere, it was on the Appian Way and there was also... erm, er... that was about it at the time. Maybe he'd just sold a smaller city plot and had decided to move out to a larger green-field site where things were a bit cheaper.

Anyway, it wasn't just the kind of colosseum you see dotted about like football grounds in the middle of inner-city housing estates, but the second largest built in Italy after that rather well-known one in Rome, with an integrated gladiatorial school, lions dens and, from the 4th century, a little chapel for Christians about to go to their doom to make peace with their creator in. A load of the marble was also imported from Greece, the local stuff not being quite special enough. Incredible. Yet with all this, it's barely known about and mercifully free from school visits.

As well as being fairly magnificent, even though most of the upper works were plundered in centuries past for the handsome building materials readily at hand, it is also a site of historical importance as it was the starting point for Spartacus' 71BC gladiators' revolt. Thank goodness for the Lonely Planet and its wealth of knowledge.

But let me go on some more. Apart from the upper works, you can stroll about the cavernous tunnels under the arena (you can see me in a tunnel in the picture!). All in incredibly good condition and not-a-little atmospheric. It's easy to imagine the lions being let up through the trap doors and the blood being washed away along the purpose built culverts as injuries were tended to and Oliver Reed (as Proximo) drunkenly stalked the cells.

As luck would have it, when I was there, there was some training going on and I managed to get this close up shot of the end of one gladiatorial contest. Truly thrilling and all for only €2.50! (about £12 at the current exchange rate, I shouldn't imagine)

After missing a train back to Caserta by 4 minutes and waiting an hour for the next train which was then late by 25 minutes, I was unable to get into the Bourbon biscuit palace gardens before they closed. However, I have one morning left, so weather permitting, I'll have a leisurely stroll and beer there tomorrow morning. That is if I don't go on a 'large one' with the examining posse here in Caserta.

Fortunately, I'm not the only examiner in town and so I don't have the mental struggles and anguish, endured by some examiners, of having to find a place to eat and drink by themselves - always a tricky one when you're eating at around 8pm - a full 15 hours or so before it seems anyone else come out to eat. In the picture you can see Jan (why she appears to be edging away from me, I couldn't say) and Kirsty - a kind of new-age therapist with a tendency for having 'bad days' and a retired kiwi literature lecturer respectively. They'd been here a week before I arrived and had got a few good restaurants sussed. I say a few restaurants sussed when in reality there only appears to be two which aren't pizzerias. Still, they do a good deal on the house wine.

On the first night when we all went out for dinner, I don't know who looked more shocked, me when Kirsty said we could share a 1/4 litre of wine between us (250ml between 3!) or Kirsty when I countered that we could start with a litre and see how we got on from there. Anyway, it's been the three of us each night with me knocking back a healthy dose of vino (at €6 for a house litre I do feel it would be rude not to) each time while we exchange examiner 'horror' stories along the lines of:

"Today I went to the examining centre and had to fail everyone!";

"Well when I went they didn't give me a banana!";

"But I was on a tour when my legs fell off and I had to staple them back on just to get to the station because the local liaison wouldn't drive me the 20 yards to get there", etc. etc.

It's out last night together so I might be able to persuade them to have more than half a glass of the house wine. I have high hopes.

4. "Today my topic is..."

Had the sun not hid behind some big, dark juicy rain clouds just three minutes before I'd finished examining today, I might have seen some people wearing today's featured Retrosuperfuture sunglasses manufactured by Selectism, designers of 'premier ocular wear for brighter weather conditions'. They also come with Easy FrameTM. I expect to see everyone wearing them when I get back to the UK.


Yesterday and today I was examining five minutes down the track from Caserta in the medieval town of Maddeloni. The school I was at was a little different from the normal as the students were not only wearing uniforms, but there was less graffiti on the walls AND they were more well behaved - I passed classrooms and actually saw students sitting at their desks. What was the reason for this? Well it wasn't your common run-of-the-mill school, it appeared to be a kind of feeder institute for the military and for a certain kind of engineering. The clue to the type of engineering can be seen on the roof of the school itself [pictured].



The type of school necessarily affected the type of presentations the exam candidates gave. To briefly summarise, the exams are at 12 different levels, with different tasks depending on the levels. From a fairly basic level, candidates have to prepare a 5-minute presentation / talk which I ask questions during / after. Because of the school, it meant a surprising amount of talks were on avionics, military aircraft design, the Euro-fighter Typhoon and the effects to drag and lift on different wing designs. For some, this might see like boredom itself, but having a pilot for a father, I was brought up on aircraft varieties, what to do in the event of sudden cabin depressurisation and the effect of the ITCZ (Inter-tropical Convergence Zone for those not in the know...) on meteorological patterns in Europe. What fun.


Anyway, the upshot was that I actually understood most of what the kids were on about and even managed a few informed questions on wing design - I gave one kid an 'A' when he took a piece of paper and modelled it to explain the effects of up and downward forces on a wing in flight. Hey, it might not be in the syllabus but if you can do that in English, you can't be bad.


Not all topics, however, where on military aircraft (e.g. the F-16 versus the MIG) or wing design. I had one 15-year-old lad come in in tell me he collected balls He had 10 small balls he told me (five Adidas and five Nike). He also had two big balls. Suppressing a grin I had to ask how big they were, to which he gestured the size. Yes, they were quite big. But that wasn't the only thing he collected, oh no. The following exchange took place:



St: I also collect heads.

Me: Heads?

St: Yes, heads. I have 25.

Me: Heads? [said again in disbelief and gesturing towards my head just to make sure]

St: Yes [now slightly disconcerted]. Heads. I have 25. My favourite is black and white.

Me: [pause and confusion] Heads? [said yet again, with more rising intonation, and gesturing again to my head but this time motioning it cut off with a machete and holding it up by the hair]

St: Eh, yes [looking more disconcerted]. I have Nike, Reebok and a NY Yankees one.

Me: Ahhhhh. Hats.

St: Si. Er, yes. Heats. My favourite is black and white.



I think we should have stuck to his balls.




To punctuate the exams, one teenage girl brought in some cakes for me (getting to be quite the obligatory hardship). Again, rather heavy and a touch on the sweet side, but getting a 7 / 10 for tastiness. Two were filled with a kind of citrus paste with little bits of lemon and orange peel inside and the other two standard cream. I just wonder what the possibility would be of putting in a request early doors that if teachers or candidates are going to bring me food, could it be a selection of meats and cheeses instead, with perhaps, a small bottle of red.

Another topic which was only just scraping past the pass bar was on this lad's collection of currency, mostly lire dating from before 1980. At the end of the exam he insisted on giving me a 500 lire note from 1974. Being Italy and not knowing whether this was some kind of a bribe, I dutifully accepted the 'gift' and bumped him up from a 'C' to a 'B' just to make sure I didn't break local protocol. Well, you don't want to offend, do you?

Other topics of note include different techniques to carry out the death penalty (along with pictures to aid discussion). Upon questioning, the candidate said he'd prefer hanging to lethal injection. I suggested a simple bullet to the head and to my surprise he said that he hadn't thought of that, but that it did seem an alright way to go.


And then there's also the perennial young chap in a band who likes Rage Against the Machine and will be famous one day soon, and just might be. One Alessandro (from Sparanise) gave me his link on Youtube for his band 'Same Shit, Different Date'. If you do go to the site, type in Sparanise SSDD and you'll see him repeatedly throwing a microphone off a wall. The action with the microphone will probably account for the lack of singing going on and the great amount of shouting. I wonder if anyone's yet suggested singing into it.


Not that it's all fun aeronautical design, death and cakes. There's also the usual quagmire of 'My family and other animals' and 'My hobby: football'. There was even a terribly earnest one on AIDS on Tuesday - not at all the kind of thing to build your appetite before the next round of cakes is brought in. Anyway, same shit, different school tomorrow and my last day in Caserta before heading to Naples and there's still the local evening examining scene to describe, the Bourbon biscuit palace and an amphitheatre.