Naples & Pompeii

So... back to the holiday. We left Stromboli at 5pm and got the evening ferry to Naples - 4 hours. We were pretty lucky as they stop the ferries to Naples at the end of September so it worked out well. Otherwise we would have had to go back to Messina and get a train up to Naples which would have taken the whole day so the 4 hour ferry was a much better option.

We stayed at Il Convento in Naples - it was alright. Very dark room which looked out onto a building being renovated. First hotel I've ever stayed at which supplied earplugs!! But it had been recently renovated and they had done a lot to block out the noise so we didn't actually need them. I've stayed in far noisier hotels!

After Palermo Naples was much nicer. Although everything we had read about it went on and on about the bag snatching being rife so we were completely paranoid everytime we left the hotel. But I felt much more unsafe in Palermo than I did in Naples. Consequently there are no photos from Naples as we were too worried about taking our cameras out! We only really had one day in the City - we wandered around, went up one of their cable cars, went up to a gallery next to the castle overlooking the city. That was pretty cool - had loads of nativity sets. I will come back and update this entry as I can't remember what it was called at the moment, and my google searches don't look right...

The next day we went to Pompeii. I have loads of photos from there to add to Flickr so will let you know when they are done. It was really quite incredible. Somewhat stupidly I hadn't really thought about how big it would be - the site is over 100 acres...

Us being us we duly got our Audio Guides and set off. Little bit of Megan stress at the start as I couldn't find the Baths which we had a timed ticket for (never did get to see them) but once I'd got over that it got better :-). Spent quite a while wandering around, listening to the guides until that got a bit boring so then we just wandered around and listened when we found interesting buildings. Probably the wrong way to do it - probably missed loads of interesting things but never mind! Halfway through it started to thunder and rain which was actually a blessing as the place emptied out. It went from a lovely sunny hot day to being dark and very wet - and not many people were prepared. Of course we were as I'm a weather obsessive so we just pulled out our walking jackets and we were sorted! As were most of the English people there (also weather obsessives - I must have got the gene from my Nana I think!).

I was somewhat morbidly fixated on seeing 'the dead people' as that is what I remember Pompeii being most famous for, but the only ones we saw were in a storage barn. Still very chilling. I read that a lot of the body casts are in the archaeological museum in Naples and we didn't get a chance to go there.

It was an incredible place however - and some of the frescoes that were still around were incredible. The fact that they have lasted so long is quite mindblowing - I've included a picture below, but there are plenty more on my Flickr site as well. Coming from Stromboli I really appreciated a bit more the power of the volcano... Interesting too that some people had the chance to leave but didn't. In fact at Herculaenum (nearby) they found a whole heap of bodies about 20 years ago - they had originally thought that only about 20 people died there, but they found around 150 I think down by the sea. Very sad really - they fled to the sea as they thought that would be safer... We didn't get a chance to get to Herculaneum but it is also meant to be really interesting.

The key thing for me at Pompeii was just the realisation that the site was so big, that so much of the town was affected, and that even now you can still wander around those streets. And Vesuvius still just sits there biding its time...