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August 20th 2007

Published: August 30th 2007

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Travel diaries

The Duomo in Florence

Construction began on this building in the 13th Century

Bet you thought we had dropped off the face of the earth...Is anyone actually reading this thing anymore?

As we sit in our air conditioned room in our hostel in Barcelona, it's easy to look back on Italy and see the things we didn't enjoy - massive crowds of tourists, mopeds nearly taking our life in a crowded market, a lady on the bus getting her purse snatched - but there were plenty of great sites too, Pompeii being undoubtedly the highlight.

On the 24th August 79AD the nearby volcano Vesuvius erupted and spewed ash all over Pompeii. After many years of excavations you can now walk through the town and see how the people of the time lived. The first thing to strike me was the size of the place - it's comparable to the size of a small town at home, much bigger than I expected. Then once we got inside we saw an amazing collection of preserved frescoes on walls, gardens, walkways, roads, political graffiti, shops, sporting stadiums, theaters and even a brothel (complete with beds and suggestive artwork on the walls).

Casts had been made of Pompeii's residents, made possible by cavities left where

The statue of David

We had to be content with seeing the replica in the courtyard outside. Unfortunately the crowds were too hard to beat on this particular day.

a person had been buried alive in ash, with the ash solidifying to leave an amazing time capsule showing what the people were wearing and doing in the moment the volcano took their lives. The casts were crudely preserved as they were made in the mid 1800´s however they were still eerie things to see.

Before Pompeii, which is only half an hour out of Naples (itself not really an interesting place to talk about), we had been to Florence, the capital of the Tuscany region. Florence was a beautiful city with fantastic architecture and a brilliant cultural scene. The only thing to detract from Florence was the hordes of tourists. After some places in South America where we were the only travelers in town it was quite difficult to cope with. Tour guides brandishing umbrellas would usher their victims around sites at record pace stopping only, it seemed, in doorways to block our paths.

The highlight of Tuscany was undoubtedly a day trip to Siena, a small medieval town. Siena is famous for a madcap horse race where riders compete bareback around the plaza. Unfortunately the race wasn´t running while we were there but we did get

Beautiful Sienna

A town about an hours drive from Florence where we spent the day to avoid the crowds (only to find another crowd)

to see the cathedral and have the best pasta we have ever had in our lives.

We also managed to squeeze in a day trip to Amalfi via Sorrento and Positano.

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