Day 35 – May 20 Friday
I’m getting to like these late starts, up at 6am, breakfast at 7am & away at 8am, very relaxed this morning for our short journey from Sorrento to Pompeii. The Bay of Naples had a couple of low cloud layers & the visibility was hazy, with the broody Mt Vesuvius standing menacing in the background. A few fishing boats were trying their luck & a couple of ferry boats already scurrying across the still & flat sea. The traffic out of Sorrento was a little busy so it took us about half an hour to reach Pompeii, just south of Naples & again, we were amongst the first tour groups there & it was thankfully still nice & cool.
Pompeii is amazing, it is now located around 3km from the sea, but when Vesuvius buried the Roman city in 79AD, the sea was lapping against it’s walls & the wharfs at the seaport gate. I had always been interested in Pompeii & read a fair bit about it, but never realised how big the city is, it’s huge. We wandered up & around the paved streets, still with wheel ruts from the Roman carts worn deeply into the stones. The Romans were remarkably advanced, multiple bakers, hospital, doctors, sliding doors, running water, upstairs inside toilets, bars, brothels, multiple temples, gladiator school & theatres. It is interesting to note that one of the theatres was built by the Greeks around 300 years before the Romans built Pompeii. Before the Greeks, evidence of Etruscan habitation has been found at the site & before them the Osci from central Italy in the 6th-7th century BC.
Pompeii started to get busier as more & more tour groups piled in & the day became very warm, I’m glad we’re not here in summer. The main drinking fountain in Pompeii had worn down where the Romans had placed their hands to lean in to drink, that is a lot of hands over a lot of years. There was a collection of storage jars, mostly broken, a few plaster casts of bodies of people plus a dog frozen in time from when they had died. Pompeii is remarkably preserved, there has been some reconstruction of a few components to show what a building looked like before the weight of the ash collapsed the roofs. There are the remains of a few frescoes scattered around the city, most of the frescoes have been removed & taken to museums for display over the years since the excavations began. Around one third of Pompeii is still buried, our local guide told us that will remain for future generations to uncover. There are houses & other buildings sitting on top of the still buried city. As we left Pompeii through the old port area an influx of more tour groups were pouring in, it was starting to get hot & we were glad to stand in the shade waiting for our bus.
Off back towards Rome & we stopped at Cassino, the site of a Commonwealth War Grave from the 2nd world war where over 4,000 servicemen are buried, mostly Canadian & New Zealand. It is very tidy & sombre, the graves of so many young men, such a terrible waste of young lives.
We drove only a few more minutes to our last destination – Rome. The Sheraton hotel is so enormous, it’s located south of the city area closer to the airport as most in the group is flying out tomorrow. We had a farewell dinner at the Papa Rex Restaurant, it was once again a wonderful feast with a piano accordion & tambourine played by a young woman with a most wonderful voice singing. We had the last supper so back to the hotel where we had our last farewell – it was a great group & made some good friends. These Italian bus drivers have all been amazing & they can have their jobs. Our last tour guide was an Italian who was a lot more “C’est la vie” but a very charming likeable man. Tomorrow we are off to visit the Hungarian relatives, I am starting to get very excited as I haven’t seen them for 15 years.
Trekkin 