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The Pompeii Basilica
Typically used as law courts.There was no lemon juice for breakfast, freshly squeezed or otherwise. There were a lot of cakes though, so I was very happy, despite it not being in the league of the hotel in Gibraltar (see
Burglarising, Thieving, Mugging and Fighting Moneys). I did particularly love the homemade marmalade, although it was made from the usual oranges rather than lemons.
We were woken up art 7.00am by someone tidying the gardens with the world's loudest leaf blower, but it wasn't then long before we were planning to get up anyway, as the plan for today was to go to Pompeii. This, to be honest, was the main reason for coming here. We had been reliably advised that the best way to get from Sorrento to Pompeii is by train so we headed to the train station, which was only about a 10 minute walk from our hotel.
We went to what we thought was the ticket office, along with a lot of other people, although to be fair to all of us, it was marked as "train tickets" and was part of the station. Tickets were €15 each. As we walked up to the platforms, we realised that we had been completely mugged as
Hotel Breakfast
Starting with smoked salmon, scrambled eggs and, of course, cakes. there was the actual ticket office.
We should have known better, given our experiences in Rome (see
Unofficial Officials). In Italy, you need to look for the actual official tickets and not the resellers, who charge huge mark-ups. Apparently, we had reserved seats in an exclusive carriage on the express train, along with all the other suckers who had not checked-out the station property. Yet another note to self - next time, find the official ticket office.
If this is an express train then I dread to think what the normal train is like. The countryside was not exactly a blur as we trundled along, stopping at numerous stations on the way. There were also a lot of people heading to the airport and they all seemed to insist on keeping their bags in front of them, leaving virtually no leg-room for anyone sat opposite. This was not an exclusive €15 per person premium experience!
Of course, our exclusive, express carriage arrived at the same time as the rest of the train. Eventually, we got off the train in Pompeii and were promptly mobbed by more people selling tickets and guided tours, but we were not going to
Unofficial Ticket Office
Don't succumb to the deception and harassment to get your tickets here - turn right and go to the official ticket office. fall for that one again. Basically, just ignore them, turn right out of the station and the actual, official Pompeii ticket office is five minutes' walk away. And there were no queues for tickets (so the earlier tickets that were touting themselves as "skip the line" would have been a complete waste). As we're British, we joined a queue anyway just to later discover that it was the queue for the women's toilets. We hadn't noticed that we were the only two men in the queue.
We had been advised to go on a guided tour, so we needed to wait a while until there were enough English speakers for a group tour and then an English speaking guide took us into the Pompeii site. We would definitely, recommend a guide as there was so much that we would not have seen or would not have known about if it had not been for our guide. There is an audio-tour option also, so that may well be an informative alternative.
The eruption occurred on 24 October 79 AD. It seems that people who had managed to leave prior to the eruption headed back, thinking it was all over,
The Forum and Mount Vesuvius
The main centre of Pompeii life and the same basic layout as the Forum in Rome, with Vesuvius in the background. but there was a second, which released a cloud of poisonous gas meaning that people were killed before they were able to escape again. The gods were certainly not on their side that day.
Vesuvius is about ten kilometres from Pompeii and is still classed as active, with the last eruption having occurred as recently as the Second World War.
Pompeii remained buried in six metres of ash and rock until it was discovered by a farmer in 1738 and so started nearly 300 years of excavations. All that ash was used for crops, given it is very fertile, and the volcanic rock has been used for building. So scale of what has been uncovered is mind blowing. The city covers about 165 acres, with about 60 acres still to uncover.
Now there were three main things that we learned about life in Pompeii:
1. They were unbelievably advanced for their time. The city was incredibly well designed, with the Forum in the middle and a grid of streets that had been specifically designed for drainage through the streets, with stepping stones so people could cross. The toilet areas were kept separate so as not to
Fertility
Just in case you were unsure. mix in the sewage. Water came from an aqueduct and was piped into the properties using a combination of lead and ceramic pipes (much of which was actually still there). Thermal water was also used to provide underfloor heating and for the thermal baths. It was more advanced than the UK was over 1,000 years later (I remember a tour around Edinburgh were we were told that sewage was just thrown out of the windows during the middle ages). We probably didn't actually catch-up until Victorian times.
2. They were very commercial. For example the streets approaching the forum and their colosseum were lined with shops and fast food outlets, very much like the approaches to our football stadiums now. At one end of the Forum, which had the same basic layout as the Forum in Rome, were two markets. At the other end were the temple and the Basilica (court-house).
3. They were obsessed with sex. There were apparently 26 brothels across the city. One place also served food and was noted as "food and fun". At various places, there are penis symbols indicating the fertility of the man who lived there. One house that we looked
Body
The plaster cast of a body killed in the eruption. round was covered in pictures and statues of people with absolutely huge penises. It sounded like over compensating to me, but who knows.
Some of the houses were still covered in colour, art and mosaics, which it is hard to believe is 2,000 years old. We were also surprised how open the access to everything is, although some of the most impressive houses did have someone keeping watch. There was a particularly large, opulent and well decorated house that belonged to a wine merchant (this is the one with the huge penises) and another larger, but less well decorated house that is thought to be the second home of a politician from Rome.
There were often mosaics in the entrances to the houses. One had a mosaic of the letters "H.A.V.E." which apparently means "Welcome to the house". Some others had mosaics of fierce looking dogs, meaning "You're going to get bitten". Dogs were not kept as tame, domesticated pets.
Parts of the city had been damaged due to some bombing during World War II. It's really sad and pretty outrageous that the city was uncovered after 2,000 years and then got bombed. We were shown where
Bakery of Popidius Priscus
The wheels to grind the corn and the oven behind. repairs had been made and there was still a fragment from a bomb laying in one of the houses.
We stopped at the museum before we left, where there are a number of artefacts that have been moved from where they were originally found. This included some plaster casts of some of the people found. Basically over the years, after they had been covered in ash, they bodies decomposed to leave a void in the ash. When they were excavated, plaster was poured into that void to recreate the bodies. There are two in the museum, a man and a woman, and she is laying down, whilst he is, let's say imitating those pictures we saw earlier. Sadly and traumatically for them, it seems to be clear what they were up to when the volcano erupted.
Hum. It's how we'd all like to go! Going with a bang! The earth literally moved! There does seem to be plenty of puerile and inappropriate blog material there. It just brings it home how sudden and deeply awful it must have been.
We went to the actual ticket office to get the train back to Sorrento and the tickets were
Check This
So huge and getting it weighed against a bag of money to prove it. €2.60 per person, so about 1/6 of what we had paid earlier. Granted, we didn’t get the reserved seats in the so-called exclusive carriage, but it was just as quick as the so-called express train.
We told our son and daughter all about Pompeii and sent some photographs on our group-chat. Our daughter's response was, quite understandably, "So basically they are obsessed with willies xx".
As we were in Italy, we decided that we would go out for pizza in the evening. The hotel had recommended two places. The first was Franco's, which had a huge long queue outside so we went to the second, Tasso, which was quite near the central square. The pizzas fulfilled our expectations and the service was a million times better than last evening, although it didn't have the lemon gardens to walk around afterwards (see
Lemons, Mutant Lemons, Lemon Merchandise and, in a Moment of Madness, a Lemon Drink). Oh, and we remembered our jackets, so we were not freezing this time.
We were given a complementary Limoncello lemon liqueurs after the meal. It was quite nice actually, so I may need to get some to take back home with me.
It's the day of the Coronation back home and the TV in
H.A.V.E.
Welcome to the house. our hotel room had a BBC channel, so we finished the day by catching-up on the highlights of the day's events in London.
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