Wednesday, April 24, 2019

25th Anniversary Cruise, Part 7: Pompeii

In this series of posts I'm describing the Mediterranean Cruise my wife Becky and I took in 2018 for our 25th anniversay, Here in Part 7 I'm covering our seventh stop, Pompeii.

Pompeii (★★★★)

Pompeii was marvelous. In terms of historical richness and the amount of things to see, Pompeii delivered more than any other stop on our trip. 

Pompeii was an ancient Roman city near Naples that was buried by lava in the AD 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The result is a highly-preserved ancient city. It's also a complete city: you can walk it's streets, look into houses and public places and restaurants and so on. It's not possible to see it all in one day, but our excellent tour guide Jose took us to many of the highlights and gave us lots of good information throughout the day.

Pompeii is in pleasant surroundings with picturesque hillsides, trees, and flowers.


Our guide walked us past practice fields for the gladiators and an amphitheatre.



We then proceeded to walk the streets. The Pompeiians were pretty sophisticated. There were stone blocks to step on so upper-class citizens could avoid walking in garbage. There were shells embedded in the streets to provide reflective illumination at night.


"Your Money is Welcome Here"

Seeing Roman homes was impressive. Some homes had impressive floor tiles. Wall mosaics were common.


Public baths with hot and cold water; and a restaurant kitchen.



We also saw some of the casts made of bodies.


Inside this arch you can see Mount Vesuvius.


That's about all we had time for, but despite seeing a lot there's far more to Pompeii. We certainly felt Pompeii didn't disappoint.

Previous: Part 6: Rome


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