Pompeii and Vesuvius

July 23-24

We intended to both of these in one day, but it was so hot and Pompeii was SOOOOOO much bigger than we expected that we broke them into 2 days so that we could hike Vesuvius in the morning. Herculaneum was also a nearby option and would have been interesting as well, but we wanted our last days in Italy to be a little more relaxing.

Pompeii -

We jumped on the Circumvesuviana train (kind of like an above ground metro) and rode to our Pompeii de Scavi stop. Think hot, no air flow, tons of people sweating (even the Italians) and I don't mean a little persperation - I mean dripping, gypsies asking for money as the young girls hold their babies, saxophone players playing on your car until the next stop, pick pockets, etc. Good times!

We arrived in Pompeii to a whole market of booths selling Pompeii and Vesuvius paraphenalia. There were also many stands with oranges and lemons (some lemons the size of nerf football). They sold fresh squeezed orange juice and lemon juice. They also sold granitas which were slushy/icy versions of those juices. Yum!

Walking into Pompeii was incredible. It was a huge and very modern, for its time, city. The streets went on and on. The housing went right up to the streets and shared walls all the way down. They had lead pipes that brought water from the aqueducts to the baths, private homes, and then others that brought water to the public water fountains.

I thought it was interesting that the poor were mixed with the rich, the restaurants and businesses were all interspersed. There were many houses that still had frescoes, mosaics, and even statues still there after excavation. There were several temples as well that seemed to be for different religions (we saw ones for Roman gods and another for Egyptian gods). They even had a theatre that looked like a mini-version of the one we saw the Greek play in at Epidavros, Greece. There was a bakery with a wood-burning oven, a public bath with the warm and cold baths, restaurants for the lunch crowds with holes in the counters for their pots, and even a brothel.

The streets were down a large step lower than where the buildings were. They had stones you could step across like cross walks at intersections. If there was just one stone, it was a one-way street because only one ox-cart could go through, if there were two or more stones it was two way. They also had the sidewalks raised so they could flood the streets to clean the trash and sewage out of the city.

The eeriest and sadest part of the town was seeing the casts (plaster poured into hollows where they thought people had died(. There was a room full of all the pottery and then casts of many people in the positions they died in from asphyxiation because of the 6-7 meter thick ash and cinder they were buried in. You could feel their emotions in their body positions.

Vesuvius -

The next day we went to climb to the top of Vesuvius. It's still an active volcano with it's last eruption being in 1944, but of course the big one that buried Pompeii in ash and Herculaneum in lava and hot mud was in 79 A.D. We rode a bus and then started the hike. It was only about a 30 minute hike from where they dropped us off, and you could walk around about half of the crater lip. The views were beautiful although it really was crazy to see that so much of the city is built so close still and is surrounding the mountain.

Sorrento -

For our last night in Italy, we enjoyed our last pasta dinner (homemade pasta with pesto) and finally tried octopus (I won't need to do that again. There's just something difficult about the suction cups and tentacles that was hard not to gag on.). We also had our last gelato. Sigh! Goodbye Italy!