Outside of Naples, in the town of Castellemmare di Stabia, we attended the wedding reception of our friends Loredana and Steve. Beyond the seven courses of food to feed these hungry cyclists, seeing friends for a few days off the bikes helped replenish our spirits for the next part of our trip.

We joined Steve and Jane, other Seattlites in town for the event, to visit Pompei, the site of sites for Roman history — an entire city preserved in ash after Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. Some of the buildings were so entact that you could see 2000-year old grafiti on the walls. In other buildings, bodies were cast in plaster, exactly as the archeologists found them during excavation. Most striking, the bodies were so small — you only had to be 5-feet tall in order to be a Roman soldier.

Naples is a gritty city and we spent one day there, most of it in the Archeological Museum, and that felt like enough. But Naples is also the center of pizza, and we discovered that the best pizza has provola cheese (smoked mozzarella) and arugula. The cuisine of Italy is perhaps the best suited of any for endurance sports, with all of those delicious carbs — bread, pasta, risotto. The only problem during the course of a day’s ride is planning ahead for siesta since supermarkets (and most other businesses) are closed from 1-5.

After our stay in Castellemmare, we decided the best way to bike out of the area was to take a vacation from our vacation and ride down the Amalfi Coast, to the southwest of the city. The coastal road is famous for being attached to the sheer cliffs, and it made for some of the best riding of our trip. Sorrento, Positano, and Amalfi are all overpriced tourist locales, but the road itself was the draw. Despite warnings, traffic was light and not very high speed with the constant turns of the road around and through the rock.

The ride had a touch of a James Bond chase scene — whizzing over cobbles as well-dressed couples stepped out of a limousine in front of a 5-star hotel, through a piazza in a flock of scooters, around a tile-domed church and suddenly back out on the edge of the cliff, looking down at some ridiculous megayacht.

The coast is also known for its lemons, and we saw some that were larger than cantelope. I’m not referring to the megayacht owners.

In Amalfi we took the ferry to Pozzuolli, a suburb east of Naples, as our strategy for bypassing a lot of the Neapolitan traffic. In addition to Vesivius, the region has a lot of thermal features and we rode to a campground located in the caldera of a low-lying volcano. I understood that this volcano, La Sulfatara, which means “rotten eggs” in Italian, was inactive, but still had bubbling mud pits and steam spewing forth, much like you see in Yellowstone.

Something very unusual happened next, and that was the flatness of the roads we encountered. We rode 130km the next day to celebrate, our longest day. We also encountered bits and pieces of Via Appia (the Appian Way), the old Roman roadway. When the Romans weren’t having orgies or throwing victims to wild beasts for amusement, they were building great roads. Via Appia is known for being completely straight and flat, even cambered for drainage purposes, and the 260m “pass” that we climbed was evenly graded.

The sections we rode were asphalted, but we could often see the old cobbles on the edges of the road. Evidently much of it closer to Rome has been excavated and preserved.

Via Appia gets busier, and without a good alternative and after much discussion we have decided to bypass Rome. Major cities are not the friend of the bike tourist, and it boils down to the idea that these trips are designed to visit the places you don’t see by plane, train, and car.

So instead we’re making our way up the coast, through not-very-pretty coastal development built for Roman holiday seekers, but at least we have the sea. We stayed in the largest campground imaginable that had all the amenities you’d find on a cruise ship — hair dressers, Latin dance classes: a bit surreal.

And what’s also happening everywhere you turn is the World Cup. The three times Italy has played (and won) since we’ve been here, we’ve had the temptation of riding on the deserted traffic-free streets, but the draw of watching the local team with the locals is stronger. And we’d need to be promptly off the streets by the end of the games anyway to avoid the swarms of scooters adorned with Italian flags and the storm of horns and chaos, with each Italian victory.

But we care more about Portugal, who along with Italy, Germany and France have advanced to the semi-finals. The 80km of riding yesterday was nothing compared to the stress of watching Portugal squeak by England last night.

Soon we’ll be in Tuscany.