Mount Vesuvius and the ancient ruins of Pompeii

I would like to preface this post with the incredibly happy fact that I found hamburger fixin's in Italy:


WIth real Heinz 57! Eating that burger is that happiest I have been in a really, really long time. I also managed to actually go INSIDE the collosseum this time I was in Rome, so here you go:






And here is the line you wait in to see it:


Unless you are smart enough to know that you can also go to the Capitoline Hill across the street and buy tickets for both attractions with almost no wait.

And now, as promised, here are the pictures from our trip to Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius! This was supposed to just be a day trip because Pompeii is only about an hour and a half from Rome; however, we got there on March 31 and evidently tourist season (and thus, normal opening hours for Pompeii) begin on April 1 – the day after we arrived. So since we’d rented the car and gone to the trouble of driving down there (which was indeed considerable trouble) we camped out for a day so we could see everything. I’m glad we did – Pompeii was incredible. A few friends had told me not to bother going… but they are crazy. You need at least three hours to really enjoy it. Rick Steves let us down as well!! He did not even walk through the entire thing. In his entire book on Italy Pompeii gets one page and Naples gets at least 8, and his map didn't even include a huge amphitheatre in the ruins. I thought we were friends, Rick! Tisk tisk.

First I have to tell you about this driving adventure. It took us half an hour to even find the car rental area at the train station. I really don’t understand how most of the businesses in Italy can even stay open. They have the strangest working hours, completely dictated by lunchtime and naptime, and evidently car rental companies don’t care to put up any signs mentioning where they are located. But, we did find it, and the rental was only 80 euros for 24 hours, which was cheaper than taking the train to Pompeii. Plus, I wanted to drive.

Now, after the renting of the car, the finding of the car in the parking lot took us another half hour. They gave us the color and license number and told us it was somewhere in front of the train station. Hmm. After much searching we came upon this in the parking lot:




We weren’t sure if this may have at one point been our car, but luckily a few minutes later we found our actual car. Now, most cars in Italy are manual, as was the case with our rental car. Well, I once learned how to drive a manual car but I would say I know how to. Supposedly, Tim could drive a stick shift, (a topic of some debate after multiple nervous stalls in the streets of Rome), so I didn't get to drive :( but we did manage to get out of Rome onto the open road safely. However, note the complete LACK of LANES on the pavement:


Second, there are very few road signs. If you are unfamiliar with the area, you only have one small sign to indicate which road is coming up, and not all the exits are marked. I did, however, manage to navigate us out of Rome. Getting to Pompeii was a bit more difficult. We were trying to avoid driving through Naples so we choose an alternate route. I swear the map showed a very prominent road running between the interstate and the beach road to Pompeii. I swear! However, said road never announced itself on the interstate (or the “autostrade” in Italy.) We did have one significant landmark to help us out:


That’s Vesuvius, the volcano. We could safely assume from the big crater in the middle that this was indeed Vesuvius and we needed to be heading toward it. So once it looked like we had passed the mountain and were going a little too far south of it, we decided to just take an exit and head toward the volcano. We found ourselves in some very provincial outskirts of Naples. And Tim deserves some credit here: he is an extremely good driver and he stopped to ask directions twice! Well, I asked the directions, because I know some Italian. As I suspected no one in this little town spoke English, but I did manage to convey and understand enough Italian that we got to Pompeii pretty quickly. There were lots of winding roads and lots of directions, I am really proud that I understood all of them!

However, triumph soon turned to defeat once we realized we were one day too early to see Pompeii. But, the mountain didn’t close, of course, so we drove up to the crater:


And we also had an incredibly beautiful view the bay of Naples:


The mountain itself had a few nifty attractions:






The crater itself was closed off so we walk up to the edge to look down into it, but it was still pretty impressive. We got about 100 feet away from it though, which I consider getting to the top of Mount Vesuvius.

Getting UP the mountain in the stick shift car was scary, to say the least, but going down was much easier. This time we both had a chance to see the beautiful sunset:




The next morning we had exactly 4 hours from when Pompeiii opened to when the car needed to be safely back at Roma Termini train station in Rome. So, at 8:55, we were waiting outside Pompeii and planning on walking around for one hour to say we did it, then hurriedly heading to Rome. Unfortunately, Pompeii is amazing. You need at least three hours to really see everything you'd want to see. It's a huge city! It would be like walking through any other huge city, only deserted and recovered from the 30 feet of volcanic ash and mud that buried it when Mount Vesuvius erupted 2000 years ago.

Here are the public baths:

They piped steam under the floor to heat it so that your feet wouldn't be chilly when you walked out of the bath. This is no small village, this was an incredibly impressive and complex Roman city.








The forum (town square, sort of):




Ancient mosaics:








And evidently, the Romans also invented legos!


In some places you can still see paint and marble facing on the walls:


Even frescos:


Now, the most interesting frescos were in the brothel. Yes, the brothel. The next few paragraphs may not be "G" rated due to fresco content, so read on at your own risk. The brothel had a visual "menu," if you will, of positions availble in each room.


Evidenly these were not the only R rated frescos around town. This is a reproduction of an, um, piece of art that was uncovered during excavations:


And I regret to inform that my boyfriend is the embarrasing-American-tourist type who bought a postcard of this to send home. Hmm. He was also far too jazzed about that brothel so I dragged him to the outskirts of Pompeii to see this:


A really big amphitheater! Oh my goodness! Remember, all of this was buried for two thousand years until excavations began a few centuries ago. It was actually buried by boiling mud, not by lava, which may account for why so much of Pompeii is in such good condition. Now, if you're very self confident, and you would like to learn more about Pompeii in at very fun website for young children, click here: http://www.harcourtschool.com/activity/pompeii/index.html.

There was also this huge field nearby:


I don't actually know what that used to be. At this point we had just barely seen everything we wanted to see and it was 10:30... half an hour later than we intended to stay. So sadly we ran back to the entrace:




The have some plaster casts of the people they found buried there as well. We didn't have a chance to see the majority of them that are displayed in the ruins, but we did see these in a sort of storehouse as we were leaving:




Very sad. We then rushed through the very cool tourist-y souvenir shops before leaving. Now, my mother has only asked me for one thing since I have come to Italy and that is of a seashell with Mount Vesuvius carved on it like one her father gave her when he got back from WWII. So we found some:


But I didn't actually have the cash on me to buy her the big pretty ones. :( Very sad. However we did get her the $5 consolation shell below them. I hope it will suffice. I'm sorry mama.

So, we raced back to Rome:


It's in kilometers! 110 kilometers per hour, not miles. I looked over while he was driving and had a brief panic attack before I realized the difference.


Now, we arrived back in Rome at 1:30, figuring we could sweet talk the Italians into not charging us for the half hour we were over our 24 hours. But what we didn't realize is that they actually CLOSED at 1. We'd rented it at 1 the day before, so it seemed only natural that he told us to bring it back by one because they rent by 24 hour periods. But alas, here we were, back in Rome, having not seen enough of Pompeii, and still having to pay an extra day for the car.

He wasn't happy. We thought about driving the car somewhere else in the countryside since we had it for the day, but everything I had wanted to do was closed on Sundays and I think he was very very tired and stressed from driving in Italy. So we went to get some "Tea of Love and Dreams" from a cafe near his school:


It changes color as you steep it! Amazing. And then we were very boring and lazy for the rest of our weekend. I hope if you go to Pompeii you spend a lot more time there and see everything!!

Love, Kate