Emily in France π«π· Naples Has Conquered My Heart β And Stomach

Sono tornata !
I have returned from Naples, where I consumed:

- Approximately 14 caffe macchiati
- Six pizza halves and three individual slices besides (including one of pizza fritta, which tastes like a savory doughnut and is as odd as it sounds but also surprisingly tasty)

- Gnocchi alla sorrentina in Sorrento
- Swordfish caught by my waiter that morning, also in Sorrento, alongside an octopus who narrowly escaped being someone else's dinner when he flipped out of his bucket and made haste for the seafront (video on Instagram)

- Tiny, deep-fried squid
- So. Much. Mozzarella.

- Lemon granita made with Amalfi lemons, sipped under the very lemon trees that produced it
- Oddly very little gelato (I had one in the airport to bring the grand total up to two!)
- Way more caffe freddo β which is like a sweet coffee granita β than I ever thought possible, especially for someone who does not like sweet coffee
But I also β and perhaps more importantly β fell deeply in love with a city I once thought I'd live in.

According to John Hooper's The Italians (which I was reading for the bulk of my stay), Italians are dead-set on "privacy," (a word, he asserts, that they use in English, evidence of which I saw with my own eyes, in the otherwise Italian signage at the train station, asking people to keep back from the ticket window, ostensibly so that strangers wouldn't know your final destination). But in Naples, the line between public and private felt fundamentally and phenomenally blurred β if, indeed, it was present at all.

CafΓ© waiters regularly walk through the street with covered trays of espressi in plastic cups, ostensibly to deliver them to customers at other establishments β storekeepers, bankers. What could look comparable to takeaway seemed, to me, far more like an extension of the private into the public sphere.Β

Each street is home to a shrine of some kind, honoring not just a saint, but the dead and departed with photos and mementos. People hang their laundry over their balconies, but also on drying racks propped up outside their front doors. I walked past four Neapolitan women who had moved plastic chairs into a street too narrow for a sidewalk, claiming it like a terrace, and I watched as a scooter weaved among them, narrowly avoiding the propped-up feet of one nonna to better convey the pink-stillettoed passenger on the back to her final destination.
Front doors were regularly propped open; people conversed through them, smoked through them, passed parcels through them (or placed them into blue plastic tubs lifted and lowered with rope). A man lounged in his front room, half-clothed, watching television, his windows and doors so open it was impossible not to see, to hear.
I saw a woman weeping in her front room, her granddaughter consoling her while mother/daughter made a snack or coffee or tea, I'm not sure, I looked away.Β The neighbor across the way screamed down the phone line in dialect, her words aired like so much clean laundry: public, yes, but impossible to decipher, at least for me.

Cheese of the Week
I deviate slightly from French cheese to bring you this board of Italian cheeses, many of which I have no names for. As I bungled my way through Italian, the only information I could glean from the server was that one was milder, and one was more assertive. The winner, at any rate, was that hay-aged pecorino on the upper right-hand side, luscious and nutty and oh-so rich.
To discover more of my favorite cheeses, be sure to follow me on Instagram @emily_in_franceΒ and tune into the Terroir Podcast, where Caroline ConnerΒ and I delve into France's cheese, wine, and more one region at a time.
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Where I'm Going
1. To the Jardin de Villemin, for a picnic of watermelon and txacoli, in an attempt to beat the heat wave that has descended upon Paris.
2. To the American Library in Paris β my all-time fave β for books and air-con.
3. To Monoprix, to stock up on a few last-minute gifts for my people back home β America, here I come!

What I'm Eating
I'm currently working on a guide to some of my favorite places I ate in Naples (and beyond), but back in Paris, while certainly famed for its house-made pasta, Norma is also known for a creation dubbed the egg alla milanese: a soft-boiled egg situation prepared much like a Scotch egg, albeit with anchovy in place of sausage. More on the blog.
Discover more of my foodie finds viaΒ Instagram @emily_in_france.
WhatΒ I'm Writing
1. Many top culinary masters are abandoning the French capital in favor of greener pastures, where they can have a hand not just in choosing, but in growing their ingredients. My latest for the BBC.
2. TikTok's biggest wine star is on a mission to make wine approachable for the White Claw generation. For InsideHook.
3. This Michelin-starred Chicago chef is sharing the most gorgeous deep-fried whole sea bass recipe β and the ideal beer pairing β to try at home. For InsideHook.

What I'm Reading
1. I love reading books about the places I visit, but I've perhaps never picked a better travel companion than John Hooper's The Italians. The long-time foreign correspondent delves deep into what makes the Italians tick, brushing up on history, literature, religion, mafia, and more. If you're visiting Italy β or are just an Italophile β I cannot recommend this book more strongly.Β
2. Chile has a new, young president, and he's bringing a wave of progressive ideas to this country of poets and varied climes. In addition to being deeply informative, this story also had me setting my sights on Chile as my next travel destination. In the New Yorker.
3. Since I once wrote an ode to the semi-colon, I was pretty pleased to discover this slightly more nuanced exploration of my preferred punctuation in the New York Times.
A bientΓ΄t !