Alex Polizzi's Secret Italy | Naples & Amalfi Coast | Full Episode | S1EP03

italy one of the greatest countries on earth it's achingly achingly beautiful it's like a mirage i'm alex polizzi and my italian heritage is intrinsic to who i am i've got a treasure trove of childhood memories that were made here now i'm returning on a voyage of discovery that will take me from top to toe it gives me shivers to be back immersing myself in the culture of its vast regions reconnecting with my roots hi darling and uncovering some of this magnificent country's secrets this is completely blown me away wow wow this is one of the glories of italy and if you haven't seen it you really should come i've crossed off the capital from itinerary and i've arrived in the southern campania region an area of both obvious and unconventional beauty from the quirkiness of naples to the scenic retreat that is the tranquil amalfi coast naples is my first stop a vast noisy warren of streets italy's third largest city one of my grandfathers was neapolitan so i know it well but to anyone who is not a native it can feel like a rather aggressive place to me there's nowhere else in italy quite like it this is an amazing view it does give you the feeling of just how enormous naples is greater naples has almost four million people living in it over one million in the center and it's one of the most populated areas in europe and it shows from here doesn't it people think of italy and they think of the seaside or the amalfi coast they think of venice they think of florence they don't expect this urban sprawl i'm very fond of naples though i've always found it quite incredible that so many people live here when a reminder of the city's ominous geography looms wherever you turn the humankind has a habit of building in some pretty impossible places everyone here lives in the shadow of vesuvius and naples itself is built in the crater of the phlegrium fields must be pretty terrifying if you let yourself think about it this is the most densely populated volcanic region in the world which means that for neapolitans life is full of uncertainty and with the 1944 eruption of vesuvius still haunting many it's not a question of if history will repeat itself but when dr luca daouria is a researcher at the city's volcanic observatory where the activity of the volcanoes is monitored 24 hours a day so luca you here keep an eye on vesuvius iskia and the fledgling fields we are carefully monitoring all these volcanoes with different means so what you see here is our seismogram so we are showing the motion of the ground below for instance an example of a tiny earthquake they called it tonight at vesuvius this is a very very tiny earthquake the magnitude being less than yes 0.4 but in the case of volcanoes they are important for us because often before eruption there are swarms of small earthquakes when you consider that the west of the city is actually built upon volcanic land known as the phlegrian fields activity like this can and has had terrifying consequences in the 1980s thousands of families in one suburb had to be evacuated for several months it was one of the most serious crises to hit italy in recent history and worryingly the tremors have started again so vesuvius is the famous one of course but the really dangerous thing at the moment is the flagrant field isn't it uh yes this is true because it is showing something of what we call technically arrest in september 2012 there was a swarm of about 2 000 earthquakes in less about one hour so everyone got nervous yeah yeah and while in vesuvius we know likely the next eruption will be inside the cone you can prefer the volcano could happen could open everywhere we're currently standing within the phlegrian fields but it's still difficult to imagine that the land could erupt anywhere at any time luca and his team have a well-versed protocol to follow i love it there is actually a red phone i love it yeah it's an headphone which is in communication with the italian civil protection in rome so every time there is an event we are required to communicate immediately to this other civil protection so do you think that if you live in naples you take the threat of these volcanoes seriously yeah i think so because most people are aware they are living in a volcanic area they see the zoos every day obsessed about it yeah i would say scared really scared yeah it's okay to be aware of the risk but currently there is no reason to worry about bezels because it is sleeping living in the shadow of vesuvius has always influenced the way neapolitans live their lives this is an incredibly religious city and its people are hugely superstitious too on almost every corner you'll find shrines of all kinds built as figures of worship but there is one place that really speaks about the spirit of the people of naples well this is fontenelle cemetery and it's i mean i've heard about it i've never been here before it's incredibly evocative and it feels very peaceful which i wasn't really expecting apparently there's eight million bones here dating from the 16th century when there was a terrible plague that ripped through naples and most of these bodies have have never been identified so it's become a common resting ground not a bad place to lay your last earthly remains this place has been taken to the people of naples hearts people still come here and light candles and say prayers here and i think people who don't have the bodies of their own loved ones to mourn over adopted skulls and honoured in whatever way they could and this is a cemetery of poor people this was specifically bones of people who are too poor to afford a proper burial and so the poor of naples come to worship the poor dead things like the little coffins of course i've got children you know they break your heart i must admit i've added my own small token to that pile never hurts to say a prayer in the hope of grace being shown to you so that is one of the most famous skulls here the skull of donna conchetta who's famous of helping women with conception and she's known as the skull that sweats apparently if she's going to grant your request then she slightly perspires and that is why she is so much shinier than the other skulls around her there's a real cult of devotion around donna conchetta and i must say when you're desperate you'll try any port in the storm the fact that these long-term dead are still being honoured in the way that they are i think is a sign that neapolitans are very in touch both with their pasts and with their fears for the future this is a fatalistic city and i think it's it's always lived in the shadow of vesuvius and so death is very present to them there's nothing morbid about this place you could easily spend an hour or two immersed here but it's just one example of what makes this such a curious city there are many more still to be found i've always felt that naples has an authentic grittiness what i love about lake horses i love the kind of vibrancy energy it's a dirty place it's a very very busy place a lot of people live here and it feels like it this feels like the true italy in some ways you have to be quite brave to dive into the war and back streets this is ryone sanita one of central naples most deprived districts but beneath its ordinary exterior it's built quite an extraordinary reputation for itself three hundred years ago sanita contributed 90 percent of the world's production of gloves to the fashion industry and today down at dusty side street i'm told there's one business still considered to be the best glove makers in the world i have a long-standing interest in family businesses especially ones that have existed like this one for four generations this looks like a very residential area it's not why i'd expect any kind of factory but appearances can be deceiving from these modest premises mauro sculache is busy crafting handmade leather gloves for some of the world's leading designers i think every woman's wardrobe needs a little leather and mine is ready for a revamp look at these i mean honestly how pretty are those look at the color this is beautiful i'm being treated to a preview of what's going to be adorning the most manicured hands next season these are coming home with me that's very chic these extravagant gloves lined with the finest cashmere and silk are soon to be shipped to the likes of dior and chanel in paris and milan they'll fetch hundreds of pounds per pair i love these these fit me perfectly how much does a glove like this cost this one in paris six or seven hundred black they may be classic they may be but i still think they're sexy i feel my inner leather fetish coming to before i see a woman with the glove is a dress dress i'm sure my husband would agree with you it's the region's strong tradition in tanning and dying leather that wanted its reputation and mauro's family has dedicated their lives to the craft so how many glove makers are there like you in salita ah in the past there is hundred and now now yes i am alone how did you survive and no one else did because my political philosophy yes it is to have a quality yeah because today in marketing there is no medium quality mauro travels the world sourcing the finest lambs leather a material that was made for gloves so this is too big for me so what size am i imagine that uh there is no really size because it's one of is a handicraft there is no one uh article same another in the same ladder if i cut one pair here on leather yeah another one in bottom i mean it's different it's different in stretch in uh softness the best one is here is it because uh near to the bottom the lamb it sits down it rests on that side so it's a bit more worn they're more imperfections on the rump than they are on the shoulder for obvious reasons astonishingly sixty thousand pairs of gloves are produced here every year but what's even more impressive is that for each glove there are 25 intricate stages of production mauro said he gets very upset when he goes to sell and people call his gloves accessories these are not accessories a belt is an accessory a glove is a work of art whilst every stage of the craft work is rigorously checked by mauro and his team it's a small army of women living in the sanita district who painstakingly stitch each glove using these 80 year old machines i absolutely love that and did you see how quickly she did it so i just i asked how many years she'd been doing this job and she did this and i said oh well six years she said 60. yeah she's been taking myself my commencement italy has a huge tradition of peace work and i didn't know about that um but honestly to have sixty thousand pairs of gloves a year made like this twenty-five cents at a time is rather overwhelming who would have thought that you'd come up these slightly squalid stairs to find the center of napolitan glove making not me the city's food scene holds a few surprises too the cuisine here is as varied as its history but the most ancient tradition of them all is street food this is the neapolitan's take on fast food for centuries people have filled up on dishes that are cheap to produce yet rich in their flavor but i have to say some are more appealing than others tripe pigstrata's bone all the things which frankly we've become too rich to eat in england brawn are still eaten here regularly i remember eating tripe with beans with my grandmother i can't say i'm thrilled or looking particularly forward to trying it again today this is calves head this isn't quite what i was expecting it's delicious but it's boiled a bit of salt and lemon really taking me back to my childhood we in the rich western world have got used to eating things like fillet but that's only one bit and there's a lot of other bits that we leave behind but if you're going to eat like a trunapolitan then there's one speciality that has been fueling the locals in this part of town since 1945. near the port at la mazardona enzo and his family are famous for an unusual spin on a traditional dish fried pizza so he worked seven in the morning until about three o'clock in the afternoon it only is open on saturday night um um so this is how you're supposed to eat it take the corners and you use it to scoop out the middle okay okay enzo and his fried pizza have reached legendary status in naples and deservedly so as proof he's even been immortalized with his very own figurine this is considered to be the ultimate accolade in naples and the origins of this quirky tradition can be discovered in one of my favorite places in the city so we're in via san gregorius otherwise known as christmas alley and here it is christmas all year round this tiny alley is the heart and soul of the nepalitan christmas and is one of the most famous places in naples to wonder the intricate figurines made by arts and craftsmen draw a stream of curious customers and it all began with a devotion to the nativity scene giuseppe zarini's family business has been here since 1834 creating little characters for mangers in the most astonishing detail is over the years the idea of the manger has evolved from the traditional to the spectacular alongside religious figurines you can now find some craftsmen furnishing their mangers with a motley crew of characters i can see the pope i can see pavarotti i can see marilyn monroe i can see princess catherine and prince harry i think that's angela merkel over there it takes someone very dedicated to the cause of the eu to take an angela merkel home i'm not quite sure i'm that dedicated there's a real sense of humor and craft here and i mean you have to be very skilled to make this look as lifelike and as appealing as it as they managed to here i don't find this stuff tacky in the least but i do find it intriguing that religion isn't all that celebrated in christmas alley jenny di virgilio's unique creations are all about good luck he's very cool look at him so first of all if you see someone with a hump it's lucky to rob it which is why you can see he's robbed smooth corner so they're all the amulets there's the cardinal that you do against the evil eye if you think someone's giving you the lie you always do that down to the ground oh it has ah so garlic and pepperoncino together send the evil away so these are all the old old rituals from time immemorial people have done the corner and the politicians have always been superstitious i have to say to you i am not superstitious in an ordinary sense i don't think twice about walking under a ladder or a black cat but i too always do the corner he's given me this for good luck i'm so thrilled i love these i've got a gold one that i will wear on a chain around my neck all my family do gratia what i find fascinating is that religion and superstition coexist so closely and they see no problem in that i think it's lovely that two such opposing ideas can both have equal power and strength here in naples naples is a city full of surprises and contrasts it's a somewhat fitting end to my visit that amidst the chaos of christmas alley i should discover a jewel of serenity the baroque beauty that is the san gregorio armeno church isn't this wonderful right in the heart of such a busy city and right off such a busy alleyway is this heaven this oasis of peace it's quite unbelievable naples has just retreated all of a sudden very far away this is the perfect prelude to my next stop a world away from this mysterious city heading ever further south an hour's drive from naples you'll reach the breathtaking amalfi coast this is the image that most tourists conjure when they think of holidays in italy here ancient hillside villages cling to cliffs lemongraves thrive and sparkling seas shimmer from every hairpin bend but abandon the car and weave your way into the hills and you'll be rewarded with a treat for all the senses perched on this rocky outcrop just outside the village of ravello is a historic villa cimbrone i'm very grateful to be in this blissful peace and quiet with the serenity of the sea and this gorgeous green all around me after the madness of naples it's a panacea i love the amalfi coast it was my favorite part of my wonderful honeymoon i came here with my husband and we drove these vertiginous roads it's amazing it is inhabited as populous and as popular as it is because it's quite hard to get to the roads are not for the unwary let's say and um here too you have to take your courage in your hands villa cimbrone has a colorful thousand year history much of it english inspired discovered by ernest william beckett during the grand tour it became an aristocratic residence and a famous meeting place for notable names from the world of arts and politics churchill virginia woolf and the famous bloomsbury set were all drawn here more recently it's been lived in and restored to its elegant glory by the villumiere family and today it's an exclusive hotel for the rich and famous to retreat to a restorative week spent here will cost you up to eight thousand euros but the real allure of villacimbrone are the english-inspired gardens open to the public the restored boulevards and opulent rose-scented cloisters are well worth a wonder giorgio who was raised here has overseen the changes so it's a very romantic idea of the garden that there's different rooms almost and every stage of the garden represents different emotion and you have to try and feel that emotion as you go into the different aspects of the garden if you let it this place can have a profound effect on you beckett's deep depression was said to have lifted during his time here and it certainly struck a chord with artists throughout the years can you imagine wagner coming here with on horseback with his friends from the area and sitting on the belvedere and eating and drinking questions scattered around the garden visitors will come across thought-provoking statements from famous authors this is an omar cayenne piece our moon of my delight that knows no way in the moon of heaven is rising once again how often after rising shall she look through this same garden after us in vain so the idea is that you should read this and look at the garden and think upon the brevity of one's own life and enjoy every moment while one can these gardens are considered to be one of the finest examples of english garden design in europe but standing on the infinity terrace it feels distinctly mediterranean here it's been said that one feels the desire to fly jordo just said to me that anyone with any sensitivity gazing out on this view will feel the hand of the divine and this is a view that has been appreciated since roman times although i find it rather tantalizing that the sea is so far away from me i think the whole point about this coastline is the sea and the cliffs that fall so precipitously directly into the sea in his epic odyssey homer called this stretch of the amalfi coast the land of the sirens and legend has it that these mythical creatures would sing to the sailors as they pass by but it's more than just an area of natural beauty this is the punta campanella marine park 33 kilometers of coast that have been afforded protected status beneath these waters it's an ecological treasure trove of unusual habitats and species and among them a few gastronomical delicacies thrive the para pandoro is a sought after shrimp that has to be tried if it's on the menu but fishing for the shrimp isn't easy for starters it requires bespoke handcrafted nets for nearly a century locals like salvatore have been weaving with wicker and even olive tree branches to make these shrimp nets it's thought that the smell of the cane together with the bait is the ultimate temptation for the otherwise elusive creatures antonio who crews one of the few boats permitted to fish in the park has specialist knowledge of where to seek them out it's almost 100 meters deep here i asked because look how much rope he's pulling up this is not a job for the oh i just cannot i'm afraid and i like raw prawns i just don't think i can hold one long enough to pull its head off i see there's a few more there i'm going to write home about though this is a very tough way of making a living call me traditional but i prefer my food that comes from the sea to be served on a plate so i'm taking antonio's advice and having this morning's catch with linguine i feel slightly guilty using the last few shrimp in the sea for my pasta but not guilty enough not to eat it best way to eat shrimp is with your fingers and to suck any juice that you can out of that delicious it's a dirty job but someone's got a dick seafood doesn't come fresher than this but it's just one of many tastes of the campania region's cuisine i'm about to discover that the real flavor of italian cooking can be found growing among this rich and fertile land my time in the campania region has been as remarkable for the food as for the stunning scenery from which it's produced i've been on a culinary adventure from the nostalgia of street food to the finest michelin starred fair but i'm still yet to experience the simple cooking that i remember my grandmothers for so i believe behind this wall is mama agatha's cookery school celebrities of every size and shape have beaten their way to this store and i'm there next in line please welcome it i'll show you my hidden treasure alex for the past 10 years kiara lima has been running this world-renowned cookery school in the tiny cliffside village of ravello the family secrets are shared with up to a thousand students a year the school was born from the legendary talents of kiara's mother mama agata for whom cooking has always been at the heart of family life while living a simple existence here her recipes have amazingly gathered a star-studded fan base how did your mum start cooking and what kind of son of food does she do she started she was only eight years old i mean she was she is one of eight brother and sister and she was born in the second world war so when the parents left to be in the garden to work to make food for them to eat she was cooking already for the family eight years old she learned a lot from her mother and her grandmother so what we are cooking today is extremely traditional just passed from generation to generation at the age of just 13 kiara's mother went to cook for a rich american woman who lived in the village and had some famous hollywood connections my mother cooked for jacqueline kennedy in 1962 for fred astaire they were filming cool patreon rome lit taylor and richard burton came into the villain my mother cooked for them there was a free borg that was in ravello and after the female she cooked for him and he loved her lemon cake we used to call her baby agatha and you would go baby agata i love your food but i love your lemon cake so she's worth baking three times a day because they loved her food so i thought well if they loved her food maybe we can teach some traditional cooking and tell me this is your land isn't it yeah we'll grow a lot here we grow everything we have lemons all what you see below are lemon grove here are the garden the herbal garden over there all the vegetables the potatoes but we also have olive trees so we make our own extra virgin olive oil we can 3 000 jar of tomatoes a year we start four o'clock we finish at midnight for a couple of weeks goodness darling i bet you so you don't go away on holiday much we don't have much time it's quite a privilege to be invited into this kitchen the heart of this family's home for 250 years mama let me introduce you this video she's from england okay alexa i heard you love the food of your grandma and your yes when they used to cook and uh the way that we're cooking today is very very traditional it's a mama tomato sauce great yeah as a pro it's the sauce that we were always there on the stove for cooking anything everything so it's the base for a million other dishes yes i'm hoping i can tease a few secrets out of this pear okay alex of course extra virgin olive oil and then we're using gloves of garlic very simple and a few leaves of basil the first thing is that the garlic is not chopped the reason why we don't chop because this is a basic tomato sauce you don't want the flavor the garlic to be predominant okay and the same you know the basement never on earth yeah and another very important thing is the oil you know very often we read over here heat the oil drop the garlic burn the garlic so what i'm going to do now is to bring the temperature of the extra virgin olive oil gently gently up the olive oil alone absorbs the flavor from the garlic and the basil if you see the oil you can hear with your ears sizzling and when the oil becomes too hot start to spit means cara stop talking because otherwise you burn the garlic at this point i'm going to pour the tomato sauce listen to these it's a nice sound what happened in the pan we just had a wedding we married the extra virgin olive oil properly infused with the garlic and the basil together with the tomato sauce yeah kiara throws in a few ripe cherry tomatoes to intensify the flavor and then she's done now we're going to leave the sauce in peace because it's honeymooning you know so they have to merge with each other so it's long give them some privacy yeah i must say the smell of the kitchen is beginning to make my mouth water do you want to taste it with the tomato sauce yes this is the tomato sauce that my mother prepared for you earlier don't be stingy right here and then we can put some of the red hell on the top nice but this is just a basic next is an age-old family recipe farmer's spaghetti is derived as a very simple but nutritious meal that the farmers wives could throw together at a moment's notice everything would be picked from the garden we're going to use uh cherry tomatoes for this recipe then we're using oregano beautiful green olives without the pizza black olives with pips bread pizza and not last we're using capers i love capers this was my jacqueline kennedy favorite recipe and she loved this simple recipe very soon you will smell the chanel of the kitchen the best smell ever you've got some good limes darling number five my mother chopped the pasta into the cherry tomatoes she didn't put actually the parsley straight into the pan because if you burn parsley it turns into poison all of the ingredients are added to the pan left to cook for mere minutes and that's it less than 10 minutes spaghetti of the farmers are ready and when we will serve this pasta we will put no parmigiano cheese on the pasta because that will cover the flavor just use a bit of extra virgin olive oil bricks please take note that this is another big no-no along with cappuccino in the afternoon yummy yummy grater oh my goodness i wish you had smellovision it was this is just delicious it's delicious it's simple really then the cherry tomatoes the olives this is really delicious i just can't express to you you're not my mama when she is you eating she's always happy this is like the italian version of the good life slightly more aromatic with better weather less mud possibly i'm standing next to the most amazing bank of rosemary and i've got all these herbs here and we were merrily chucking handfuls of the most fresh delicious tomatoes i hate being soppy really trying quite hard this trip not to be soapy but it's made me miss my grandmothers so much i must say i had a tear in my eye because they both spent their lives in the kitchen and it's that generation of women for whom there was no other choice and yet she still loves it i found this incredibly inspiring and more than that it's just it really reinforces that family connection when you cook like that in order to feed your nearest and dearest there's such enormous pleasure and satisfaction in doing it when you get the chance and with lovely ingredients i must say i i must make more of an effort at home my journey has almost reached its conclusion but i'm still to discover the true south a part of italy that i know little about from the enchanting region of puglia onwards to the wonders of the polina national park to a crescendo in the haunting city of matera look at him with jesus

Channel: The Hotel Inspector

Views: 219,342

Rating: 4.9194293 out of 5

Keywords: The Hotel Inspector, Alex Polizzi, hotelier Alex, Alex Polizzi the hotel inspector, Budget hotel, worst rated, worst rated hotel, worst rated hotel room, worst hotel review, hotel reviews, hotel restoration, restore, professional restoration, hotel impossible, worst restaurant reviews, rated restaurants, Confronts owner, confronting owners, confrontation, travel, italy, spain, spectacular spain, secret italy

Id: 5JOVKq2tDpc

Length: 42min 9sec (2529 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020