City covered in a coat of graffiti

We arrived in Naples in the dark of night where it gave off a feel of being very creepy, sketchy and dirty. In the bright light of morning the feeling hadn't changed. Naples is a dirty city, where everything is coated with graffiti - the subways, the trains, and walls everywhere. I mean no space left to graffiti. It's a city where if you hear someone running behind you, you immediately grab your camera and wallets before they can be stolen. Turns out it's just someone out for a jog.

We visited Pompeii yesterday -- the ruins of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD.
Almost 2,000 years passed before the city buried in ashes was discovered. In 1800, a guy named Guiseppe Fiorelli invented a system of pouring liquid plaster into the spaces left in the bed of the ashes. Not only did this help with being able to excavate, it also provided us with the opportunity today to see the figures of bodies which have long since disintegrated but are left as very detailed plaster casts. You see them in heart-wrenching positions, holding their hands up to their eyes, covering their faces. You can tell that the eruption and their deaths occured without warning. The ashes and earth that fell buried the city and even increased Pompeii's distance from the sea from 500m to 2km.

We walked around Pompeii's very dusty streets and ruins for 4 hours. We saw typical homes of the wealthy, bakeries with old ovens and baking tools, an old brothel with stone beds and frescoes depicting the various sex positions once could purchase ("kind of like at McDonalds" Conor says.) We saw plaster bodies of people and one of a dog, old bathhouses, pottery and mosaics on the entrances of their homes and offices. I think that is what really struck me - the fact that you can see just how closely we have aspired to be like and have interests in the same things as these people who lived so long ago. You could spend all day there but after 4 hours in the sweltering heat we had a fairly good understanding of Pompeii.

We were going to go to the Amalfi coast today but Conor and I are exhausted. I know we're supposed to be on vacation but it's been go go go ever since we left Amsterdam so we're taking this day to relax in the third world country that is Naples. The crowded summer coast of Amalfi will have to wait for another time.

Tomorrow we'll be going to Cinque Terre on the Italian Riviera on our way out of Italy and into Spain.

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