Advertisement
Published: October 12th 2013
Porta Marina Gate, One of Seven Gates in City Wall
This is where we entered the city--but this photo was taken in the late afternoon as we were leaving, because it was so packed with people when we arrived...What can we say about our day in Pompeii? All of us agree it was both our good thing and our bad thing today. It was in turns amazing, overwhelming, frustrating, annoying, exhausting, stimulating, but definitely a not to be missed experience.
The day started off just fine, with an easy trip on the train from Sorrento, during which we smugly congratulated ourselves on our relatively early start. But even though we arrived less than an hour after opening, the place was already full of bus loads of tourists. We were frustrated by lines and crowds and especially by the fact that they were out of the informational booklet that all the guidebooks promised was excellent for touring the site. (And the promise of which made us decide not to lug our other guidebooks along with us...)
As a result we were stuck with perhaps the worst audio guide ever made and a difficult map, which the majority of the time did not match up with any signage on the ruins. Still we managed to muddle through, and saw a fair amount of the extremely large site, although we found out later we missed some of the highlights... We
fought the crowds all day, but there were a few moments on some quieter backstreets, when we could reflect on what actually went on here, and found it amazing that so much remains.
We made a beeline to Davide upon our return to Sorrento to get a much needed sugar rush, then later ended the day with a great seafood based dinner at Bagno Delfino restaurant right on the water at Marina Grande.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.142s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 8; qc: 57; dbt: 0.0702s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
