NNs On the Wind

The transit gremlins struck again today!! We had planned to take the metro Line 1 to Grimaldi Centrale Station and then the Circumvesuviana train to Pompei Scavi, the train stop across the street from the entrance to Pompei. Well… there was a general strike and all trains and local buses/metro etc. didn’t work. We took a taxi to the train station and confirmed all trains of all lines were not operating. We found a tourist tour bus operator who offered a bus ticket, no tour, for round trip. Off we went….

Pompei is as large as reported and walking around is sort of like walking in a ghost town. There are many ruins of small houses and then there are the villas with fountains and courtyards and the gardens have been resurrected.

One note – don’t buy an audio guide to tour the city on your own except from the official guide offered at the entrance. The price is the same – 8 euros but the content is different. We got our guide from an operator working at the station and it didn’t include all the sites. We’d arrive at an interesting looking villa only to learn the discussion wasn’t available in our guide. We even asked an attendant, and she looked at what we had and said no story was available. It wasn’t the official guide.

It was fascinating to see the streets, mostly with fairly wide sidewalks on either side. The streets would have been busy with carts and chariots as well as drainage and possibly sewage. You could easily see the ruts made by the wheels. There were frequent pedestrian “cross walks” of big stones that the vehicles could maneuver through and would keep the pedestrians from having to step down into the streets.

We walked around a bit and then tried to find a special location a friend sent to us. He had been up to a high point and said there was a big pine tree and a bench overlooking the city, giving a sense of the depth of the ash. When we tried to find it we learned, after crossing over a rope barrier, that that area wasn’t accessible to visitors. Off limits…… The official questioned why we had crossed the barrier. He was speaking and gesturing in Italian and we just said we had tried to go to a place I pointed out on the phone map and he got nearly angry at us. We tried.

We did find the café that was at a high point and bought some lunch. It seemed odd that the entire café and seating area had panels surrounding it and blocking the views. Maybe it gets windy at times? Could of enjoyed the view if the panels were translucent.

We walked some more, located the playing fields and the amphitheater that is very much intact. Our last stop was the Garden of the Fugitives. It was here, near a vineyard (grape vines growing), that citizens trying to escape were trapped in the ash. A technique developed during the excavation that allowed for a plaster type material to be injected and the void where the bodies had been, long since decayed, could be filled and a copy made, in place, as they had been during the eruption.

We headed back to the bus stop and took it back to the city and continued to a stop fairly close to our flat. We wandered again along Toledo St, the very active shopping street, filled with people on a Friday evening.

It was time to pack up and get ready for departure. Tomorrow, we will rent a car and drive to Vesuvius and then onto Positano which is part way onto the Amalfi coast.