Sorrento: Day 3 4/8/10 Thu…
What an awesome day this was! We took the Circumvesuviana commuter train to Herculaneum & Pompeii. I strongly recommend they be seen in that order. Herculaneum was spared the destruction Pompeii suffered due to the nature of the pyroclastic rock that rained down upon the town, encasing it in a solid mass ~16 meters high, preserving organic artifacts such as fabrics, plants, furniture & structural parts of wooden building materials & even a boat recovered from the ancient marina. Many of the frescoes & household articles were intact when the site was ‘discovered’ in the 1730’s. The maps & info booklets for both sites were superb. I kept them. It took several hours to see all of Herculaneum even though it’s considerably smaller in area than Pompeii. It was easy to imagine the beauty & opulence of life there. After reading nearly all the signs, as is my compulsion, & seeing everything at Herculaneum we traveled south to Pompeii. It’s a vast and breathtaking site. You walk through the gate & a completely different feeling comes over you. As far as your eye can see there are ruins of people’s lives, livelihoods, hopes, dreams, ambitions. Reading about the owners of the houses & business you visit makes it all come to life. There was even a sort of YMCA (near & dear to my heart) next to the stadium. We spent several hours there in nonstop awe. Location #39 is the brothel with frescoes on the walls depicting the various ‘menu options’. It was arguably THE most popular attraction at Pompeii. The other buildings could be accessed from at least two doorways but the brothel was in one out door, out the other…with a line at the entrance. It was fun. A pic of the ‘bathroom’ is posted. It was the only toilet in the whole place…oddly. The details of both of these amazing (in the truest meaning of the word) are still swimming in my mind. You won’t ‘get it’ until you go there. And you must!
We trained back to Sorrento & started looking for a place for dinner. We’d gotten in the habit of having a hearty breakfast & then going all day without food until dinner. Ok, so the next part of the story is that Steve & I missed the 6pm hotel shuttle but agreed to hoof it back up the trail that kept pedestrians off the streets (which are very dangerous unless you’re in a shuttle bus or taxi being driven by an Italian) after dinner in town rather than have dinner at the hotel, which would have been waaaay too expensive & not any better than dinner we could find in town. We found dinner at Piazza Tasso at a tourist restaurant. It was actually quite good. I had a mixed greens salad with shrimp. Steve had bruschetta & penne with mushrooms & proscuitto. So after dinner we headed for the trail. Everything was great until we missed the turnoff for the dang trail. We ended walking all the way back up the cliff on that dangerous road to our hotel. All the while, Steve’s asking me if this all looks familiar (he thought we might have missed something) & here I am saying, “Yes this is the right way! I’ve seen all these hotels & landmarks before! We’re going the right way!” Well, of course I’d seen all those things before…from the taxi & shuttle bus! Poor Steve…he started making a list of reasons why it’s so great (haha, NOT) to vacation with me. 1) A walk up a sheer cliff on a dangerous road after a filling dinner 2) Choking smoke rising up the cliff from burning trash 2) Walking along a dangerous cliff road with no shoulder to speak of 3) All kinds of interesting trash to dodge on the side of the dangerous cliff road…in the non-existent shoulder 4) Italian drivers driving at breakneck speeds on a dangerous road with no shoulder to speak of filled with trash, mere inches away from his shoulder 5) An excited wife pointing out various agricultural crops growing wildly beside the dangerous, trash-strewn cliff road with no shoulder to speak of while crazy Italian drivers pass within mere inches from his shoulder. C’mon…there were random lemon trees, fennel plants, artichokes & onions right there growing along the side of that dangerous road. He just didn’t get it.
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