Italia Day Four

In the past whenever I thought about Italy, two places always came to mind: Pompeii and Pisa. I knew that if I left Italy without seeing Pompeii I would have a hard time living with myself. So when I found out that Pompeii could be reached pretty easily from Rome, I decided to try to take a day trip. Everyone else on the trip seemed to feel the same way, so we talked to our travel agent and he said he would take us. We met our group in the hotel lobby at 6:30 a.m. (talk about a grumpy group of people), and we got on a sketchy graffiti train headed to Naples. The train ride wasn’t very long, I think about two hours or so. I only saw Naples from the train, but I can tell you right now it looked SKETCHY, sketchier than the train. Our guide then directed us to yet another dirty, graffiti-covered train which was supposed to be headed for Pompeii. After that hour and a half train ride, we found ourselves not in Pompeii, but in Salerno. I am not sure how that happened, since we were being directed by a professional tour guide, but anyone can make a mistake and this mistake turned out to be a good one. Salerno is a beautiful town on the coast of the Mediterranean, and we spent our hour layover walking around the harbor and enjoying the ocean view. It was breath-taking, with mountains rising above the coastline and the harbor full of sailboats. We finally made it to Pompeii by about 2 in the afternoon, just in time for a guided tour.
Our guide was a native of the Pompeii region, and he was adorable. He was very old and had a very thick accent, and it turns out is the very man who gave Bill Clinton a tour in the nineties. For some unknown reason, I did not expect the ruins of Pompeii to be very big. I was so wrong. Pompeii is HUGE. MASSIVE. It is a legitimate city that has been dug out of the ash, and you can walk around in it for hours just like you can any other city. The walls and streets are still intact; you can see original water pipes running down the sides of the alleys. There are frescoes in some of the houses and political campaign slogans on the walls of the buildings. There was a large plaza with the remains of a huge temple and other sacred buildings. There were restaurants where you could see the holes they served food out of. We went to the brothel, complete with stone beds for hygienic purposes and very explicit frescoes on the walls. I just didn’t realize that it would be possible to walk around the city for blocks and blocks, just like the volcano had never erupted.
I thought the whole experience would be sadder than it was, and honestly I don’t know why I wasn’t more moved at the thought of a city full of people dying. Maybe the brothel helped me feel better about it, sort of a Sodom and Gomorrah thing, I don’t know. At any rate, we saw the plaster casts of the bodies of people and animals who were killed; when Pompeii was excavated, they discovered holes in the ash which were the shape of bodies long ago decayed, and so they poured plaster in them in order to study the forms. The plaster casts were sad, but not horrifying.
We went back to Naples and then caught a train to Rome, where we ate dinner at a restaurant run by nuns from all over the world. I LOVE nuns. I kind of want to be one. I don’t know why, but that is the fact. There were nuns from Africa, nuns from Asia, nuns from Italy, and their food was great. Part of the proceeds went to mission efforts across the world, another factor in the restaurant’s favor. The nuns sang a version of “Ave Maria” for us, which I loved, and then we left to visit the Trevy fountain one last time. I don’t remember the last time I felt as exhausted as I did that night…. Needless to say I slept great once again. One very good part about traveling is good sleep.