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In downtown Naples, just off the waterfront, stands this massive fortress, known by two different names: the Angevin Castle or the New Castle. The Angevins were the family of Charles I of Anjou, and the castle is also called "new" because it went up about 1280 AD -- some 300 years after the other downtown Naples stronghold, several blocks away. Inside this castle lived some of the wickedest kings and queens of later medieval Europe; now, the Naples municipal government holds its meetings there. |
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Off Naples are three islands famous for vacationing -- Capri (the best known), Ischia, and this one, Procida, rarely visited by Americans. On Procida, as you can see, one of its two tiny port towns has something of an Arab look and feel. The Saracens, out of North Africa, came here, sometimes to trade peaceably and sometimes to conquer and covert, in 8th- and 9th-Century jihads. The beaches are quiet and full of sun, and the sand is often a lovely gray, thanks to the local volcanic minerals. |
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This temple is Greek, not Roman; you find no less than three of them, all spectacularly well-preserved, in Paestum, about an hour's train ride south of Naples. The Greeks settled there, along the Sele River, more than 700 years before Christ -- 400 years before the Romans came to rule in this region. This temple and one of the others in the city were consecrated to woman deities, to Hera the Queen in particular, and the area was a center of Goddess-worship. Such religions are more ancient, throughout the Mediterranean and the Middle East, than worship of a Father-God. | 
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