As a child I read this sentence and imagined that travelling to Naples is the last thing one should do, if one would then die.  My interpretation of the well-known Goethe quotation was of course completely wrong. Nonetheless Naples was for me a symbol of death and not of life. Regardless of whether I thought about the crater of Vesuvius, the unfortunately buried town of Pompeii or the deadly Camorra. But there is really a lot to see and admire locally and so finally I recently went there.  Despite the slightly queasy feeling I had based on my early childhood, mistaken interpretation.

I had a cold and didn’t feel particularly well, but everything had been booked, so I hoped for an improvement. The opposite happened. After arrival the flu knocked me out. My throat hurt as if someone had stuck a knife into me at short intervals, every time I coughed I thought that part of my lung had come with it and my limbs and head hurt so much that the first two days I could do nothing – except sleep.Read More »