Road to Pompeii

The road to Pompeii from Fucecchio took 5 hours and that included many road stops. Our plan was to find accommodations for the next couple of nights near or at Pompeii and then move on to our next booked accommodation on the coast in southern Italy.  We arrived on the Amalfi Coast during rush hour and it was hectic. We drove around for quite a while looking for a place to stay for the 2 nights and it proved quite difficult.  We first drove near Pompeii and it was scary.   It’s not like there were scary looking dudes around, it was just the setting….the sky was grey and the sun had just set but you could see the garbage everywhere….and I mean everywhere.   Along the side of the road.  On the road.  On lawns or reasonable facisimile for lawns.  On the playgrounds.  There were abandoned cars on vacant lots.  Garbage cans overflowed with chairs, plastic bags, diapers…you name it.   OK, enough about the garbage ….but you really are not prepared for how nasty it looks.   We discovered later from some of the locals that the Mafia (Sicilian Mafia that is…like in the Godfather) was not too impressed with the recent elections and specifically the mayor of Naples who was not responding as expected to Mafia pressure.  The garbage collection and most unions are controlled by the Mafia so they turned off garbage collection.

Most hotels were booked and others were really expensive for a tiny room.  At 10 pm we finally settled on Novotel in Salerno and it turned out to be great. Modern rooms, great swimming pool, decent size room for all of us and a nice Italian buffet for breakfast. We crashed almost immediately, until the fireworks outside woke us at midnight. We never found out what the occasion was but they were pretty.

Pompeii is somewhere both Calvin and I have always wanted to go and so we decided to hire a personal tour guide to really immerse ourselves in the history of Pompeii. Her name was Mema and she turned out to be very passionate about the ruins and was eager to share it with us.

A little history, if you are interested…Pompeii was inhabited by the Romans and in 62 AD it suffered an earthquake that damaged many buildings. They started to rebuild after the earthquake which was a prelude to the tragic day in 79 AD when Vesuvius erupted and buried the town in 20ft of pumice and ash. Over 2000 people died and the town was preserved, quite intact and petrified in time... until 1748 when some excavating began. Paintings, mosaics, carbonized loaves of bread, and a whole city of buildings survived.  This a picture of one of the four wood ovens in one of the dozen bakeries around the city.   Much of the city is still being excavated but I was shocked at how large it was. 

We saw bath houses with ancient lockers and steam rooms, a “fast food” shop with circles cut out of the counter to keep the food chilled, cross walks across the roads to keep your feet clean from the animal mess on the road, speed bumps down two lane streets to slow chariots (you could actually see the grooves from the chariot wheels) and a brothel complete with graphic frescoes on the walls.

There were also several bodies on display still in the same position they died in. The archaeologists used the hollow cavities in the pumice as moulds and then filled them with cement to make the displays. There were water fountains at all major intersections. 

The water fountains came in different shapes and sizes and with different figures representing the neighbourhood and used as the means to identify a location as the streets had no names.   This must have been an archaeologist’s dream to be involved with this project. Mema’s favourite line was “we (pause for affect) invented everything. Do you see these grooves in the door ways of these buildings?  These are the pocket doors for local shops – we invented pocket doors… we… .pause…invented everything”.  

You have heard of ice cream, well, the locals would trek to the top of Vesuvius to get some snow and after layering it continually with straw, the ice would last for weeks, we made refrigeration…. “we…..invented everything”. 

Do you people have air conditioning in Canada? Well, you can see from this building that it had two walls with a hollow center where cold air was pumped into the spaces to flow into the interior of the home, we made air conditioning.  “we…invented everything”.  I am pretty sure they stole that one from the Greeks but the Italians are definitely great builders. 

The mosaic on the left was uncovered at the entry to a large villa in central Pompeii.  It's of a large dog and the inscription, in latin, read: "Beware of Dog".  Not sure if Mema went with "we....invented dogs" or "we....invented home security" but I know it ended with "we...invented everything".  She was so awesome.  She took us to all the main sites when you could spend days wandernig the streets if left to yourself to roam.  Her passion was infectious and we felt as if we were Pompeian as she said ciao to us.  

For four hours it was if we had turned back time walking the streets of this large city nestled beside the sea under the shadow of great Mount Vesuvius.  It became a shrine to all that was Roman. 

We finished up at the amphitheatre.  There were a few theatres but the amphitheatre was most impressive.  It was reasonably intact after the excavation but the locals pillaged the materials for building their houses.   It was a long day in the hot sun but it was an amazing experience.  This was on our bucket list for a reason and it significantly exceeded our expectations - it is incredible how advanced ‘we’ were 2,000 years ago and you are left to wonder how far we really have come. 

We went back to the hotel to rest before going out in Salerno for dinner. Salerno is a big busy port that was demolished during WWII and has not been brought back to the glory days since but it is young (very young) and vibrant.  We had a great dinner in an Italian restaurant where there was not an English word to be heard.