Eventful day trip to Pompeii. You can only prebook your ticket to Naples and then buy tickets on the circumversuviana line, a small local train to Pompeii which only comes every half hour.
The trip to Naples on a high speed train only took about an hour.
But the local train was much slower and stopped at every station. We passed through suburbs of apartments with pealing paint and washing hanging from balconies and distant water views to arrive at Pompeii scavia.
What can one say about Pompeii? Tourists have been coming here for over two hundred years when it was part of the great European tour for people of the 19th century. It is an extensive Unesco world heritage site – you don’t realise how extensive till you start walking! Too much to take in in one day.
Modern sculptures are set amongst the ruins, similar to what we saw in the valley of the temples in Agrigento Sicily
For Anthony, it was a chance to see some of the things he had taught about in his senior classes – the house of the Faun, the forum and all the public buildings – the therma, the arena and the list goes on. But it was also disappointing for him because the places he taught about in the text book seemed so accessible and easy to see.
The reality is that when you are here, many areas are cordoned off or the mosaics and wall paintings are hidden from view or hard to really see.
This was particularly the case of the Alexander mosaic which was amazing but hard to see.
The truth is we have seen better examples of mosaics, frescoes and even buildings during our trip through Sicily where the quality and colours where more vivid and alive.
However Pompeii is also an ongoing archaeological site and therefore questions of balancing tourism with research are always evident – although some people believe that Herculaneum is a better example maybe because it is smaller or Antica Ostia is a better example of a Roman town. But we will have to wait for our next trip to check this out!
What one can say is that Pompeii is enormous and allows one to see all stratas of society from the villas of the wealthy like the house of the Mistri, to the bakeries, the takeaway shops (thermopolium) to poorer areas of closely packed together houses, the various forms of entertainments from the therma (baths), arena, theatres, brothels (we missed this) to the forum which contained the administrative, religious, political and economic centre of Pompeii and looming large over this is Versuvius.
You can in many cases walk amongst the ruins which you can’t do on other sites.
The other thing is that for political reasons most of what was found in Pompeii is housed in the archaeological museum in Naples so for the full experience one needs to do both (again our next trip!)
However it is amazing to walk the streets which were last walked by people in 79 AD and on some occasions we were the only people on the street which was eerie and if you closed your eyes you could imagine the hustle and bustle of Pompeii.
Travelling with Teresa 