Franz and Anne » Pompeii and Naples

We awoke at the port of Naples, Italy. We did not have a great deal of interest in visiting that city but we did want to go to Pompeii, which is located about 14 miles east of Naples. Pompeii was destroyed, and completely buried, during a long catastrophic eruption of the Volcano ,Mount Vesuvius, spanning two days in AD 79. Because of how it was destroyed, much of it’s identity was preserved.

When we existed the ship, we were approached by several taxi drivers and walked by most of them, but one charming young man started out telling us how to get to the train station and then offered to drive us all to Pompeii and back after 2 hours for a reasonable fair, so all six of us loaded into his taxi.

We had planned to rent those headsets with a narrative, but then decided to use one of the guides who offered us a good price for a private 2 hour tour with the six of us.

He was a very good tour guide and gave us a lot of background on the history of Pompeii as we wandered through a small portion of this huge uncovered city.

Here is the interior of what was once a house.

We then visited the Pompeii version of today’s gym. This tub had engravings of some of the politicians who were running for office at the time.

You can see the streets that were wide enough for the chariots. Because they would sometimes be flooded, there were large stones placed in the middle to walk across. I guess the chariot wheels went on each side of that bridge.

We could even see where the chariot wheels had worn down the stone street to form a groove.

Before we left Pompeii, we asked someone to take a group picture for us.

Back in Naples we found our way to a world famous Pizza shop that Mark had read about. We all had pizza for lunch, of course. The crust was amazing, the mozzarella was fantastic but the sauce was a little on the runny side for our taste. However, the place was charming and the pizza’s were cooked in the old fashioned brick ovens.

Naples was kind of an interesting city, but not as interesting as cities we had visited like Florence and Rome.

So some of us decided to walk up to the National Archaeological Museum , where many of the artifacts uncovered at Pompeii were housed. It was a very interesting museum and as they said one of the most important musuems of its kind in the world today because it contains so many artifacts. These statues were of Olympic runners. No need for clothes in those days to compete in the Olympics.