Wanders in Naples…..Day two

On Friday, I spent the morning wandering around in Naples again while Michael was at the University. 

The first thing that I saw as I began walking down Santa Lucia was a bunch of people, a few signs and some police officers……someone was demonstrating about something, so I continued on.

As I entered one particular piazza, I encountered a HUGE group of people with more signs, but these people were chanting, clapping and having a wonderful time.  This was all taking place just outside of a Middle/High School.   I stayed long enough to see which way they were moving and then to head the other direction….

Later in the day Michael told me that it was a strike….of all of the Middle and High School students!!!!!  It looked as if they had just given themselves a three day weekend, but apparently they were protesting some major cuts in education that had just been proposed by the Prime Minister.  Oh well, to each his own!!!

The destination of the day was to return to an area that I had visited on Thursday and really enjoyed.  It is a series of shops that are located on Via Gregorio Armeno….

These are the people that sell wonderful nativity sets, many of which are entire TOWNS that have the manger located somewhere in the scene.  The bigger ones are very expensive….I saw one 12-14 inch hand painted shepherd that cost 700 Euros.  However, there were an infinite number of smaller, much cheaper versions.

You start out by purchasing a backdrop…these are a couple of smaller ones…..

  Then you buy individual people, scenes etc to fill up your town….

Many of the pieces are very detailed and the nicer ones are all hand painted.  In many of the shops you can see the workers in the back putting together the miscellaneous scenes…. This guy was painting one of the larger backdrops in one of the more expensive shops.  The thing that interested me most was the “mud” paint that he was using for the first coat…..

Many of the figurines were displayed on old dirty workbenches, apparently just off of the artist’s brush and many of the shops had pots of brushes and paints sitting everywhere.

BUT, the really fun thing was seeing the small scenes that had been put into motion.  The basic motion was the same on each one, but I really liked the different ways that they incorporated the simple move.   Here is a video that shows some of my favorites…..