Our Last Day Was in Pompeii!

The train for Naples was due to leave at 11am so I took a walk to Santa Maria Della Vittoria for another look at Santa Teresa’s ecstasy before we boarded. The trip had some great new scenery for us to ponder: more villages and even castles on hilltops and there were snow-covered mountains. A change had come through from the north yesterday so it was cooler and windy but still warm.

Naples from our hotel room

Naples didn’t look too promising as the train pulled into Napoli Centrale but the station itself is all gleaming modernity, the brightest and cleanest terminus we’d yet encountered in Italy; it’s when you go outside that the fun starts. We decided to walk to the Holiday Inn and set off with my scrawled notes from Google Maps as directions but soon we were lost amidst the broken, rubbish-filled streets. The wind was cold and biting and blew the rubbish in every direction; things kept getting worse as we got more lost. The main problem was the lack of street signs, either they’d fallen off or been obscured by scaffolding. The narrow sidewalks were like rubble and there was dog crap everywhere. It being a Sunday and the merciless wind only added to the sense of desolation and abandonment. We asked some locals for directions but eventually we had to give up and hail a cab and then it seemed to take ages to get to the hotel, again through broken streets covered in rubbish. The hotel was in an even more desolate part of town and I took a look outside once we’d settled into our 16th floor room with sweeping view over the city but with no views of the bay or Vesuvius. I stepped into an empty modern piazza and it was like one of those movies set after a nuclear war: empty buildings, eerie, whistling wind, rubbish blowing and forming drifts in corners, no people, a dog sleeping just outside the hotel’s automatic doors. For a moment I got worried that I wouldn’t be able to work out how to get back inside as I seemed to be lost in a maze of high-rise but I found a way back in. Our instinct was to hole up in the hotel rather than risk walking through these deserted streets to find somewhere to eat and this was the first hotel we’d stayed in that had a restaurant that served dinner so we dined there. There was a huge contingent of Japanese tourists who descended onto the breakfast buffet the next morning in a swarming mass. It took us quite a while to get anywhere near the muesli and scrambled eggs. Later we were crammed into one of the lifts with part of the Japanese convey and, when the lift got to our stop and more Japanese wanted to get in, the woman behind Annette started pushing her vigourously until Net screamed at her to stop.
We’d decided to catch a train to Pompeii station and walk to the ruins. We asked at Napoli Centrale about getting to Pompeii by train and the woman at customer service answered in a tone that suggested her dog had just died, another example of cheerful and helpful Italian customer service! Still, she did give us the info we needed and we were away from the rubbish of Naples to see the city that Vesuvius destroyed one thousand nine hundred and thirty two years ago.

Beautiful downtown Naples

We were the only tourists to get off at Pompeii station. The town around the station certainly looked more promising than Naples, though there was plenty of trash in the streets. Entry to the museum site is 11 Euro and there weren't many tourists around when we got there around 10am. The wind was still howling and blowing a lot of dust and for the first time in Italy we were cold but the lost city looked amazingly inviting.

Pompeii is a must-see if you’ve got any interest in history and you could easily spend all day walking around and still not explore it with any thoroughness. It’s a fantastic place - a whole city buried by ash and dug out again, with street after street and temples and squares and courtyards and villas and baths and laundries and statues and kitchen implements and roaming dogs and archeologists all over the place. The Forum and its environs in Rome is a knockout but Pompeii allows you to get the feel of what it was like to live in those days. It’s just staggering, what an experience! The wind abated and the tourists increased as the day went on but we still found ourselves alone in a street or a house or courtyard many times. We walked for about 5 hours, ending up at a stadium that was built in 200BC; you can stand in the middle where gladiators once fought; it’s like a mini-Colosseum! And Vesuvius towers over it all. It’s the only still-active volcano on the European mainland, last erupting in 1944 and it looks ominous even though it’s a fair distance from Pompeii. Herculaneum is closer and they copped the full effects of the pyroclastic surge. The Pompeii residents were mainly killed by blasts of heat - 250 degrees centigrade - and the site has some of the plaster casts of people killed, preserved in their death throes. The ash covered their bodies and hardened, then the bodies decomposed and left their shape in the ash. It’s a moving and grisly sight.

The Stadium






A windblown Net amongst the ruins




A suave Rick amongst the ruins


Rooms in baths




Inside a villa






Pompeiin brickwork


An archeologist at work


Another poor guy who didn't make it






Renaissance Pompeii viewed from ancient Pompeii

Finally we headed back to Pompeii station and I was just about to ask someone official-looking which platform we should wait on when an elderly gentleman sitting on a seat on the platform opposite called out “Are you going to Napoli Central?” We said yes and he said that the train would leave from Platform 2 where he was sitting and to get to it via the underground walkway. We came out on the other side and the seat he was sitting on was just at the top of the stairs so we sat next to him and he chatted with us for over half an hour. He spoke almost perfect English and, when we commented on his proficiency, he said he had been “top of the class” back in the sixties. He said he could speak French too. He told us exactly which train to catch so that we’d get to the central station and not the Metro line. I knew that the our train was due at 3.05 but it was comforting to have him confirm everything. As he talked he kept tapping me on the shoulder or arm. He had four daughters and ten grandchildren and he had wanted to be a tourist guide at Pompeii but ended up going into the family business, which was farming, and he’d made plenty of money and bought fourteen houses or flats! “I live well” he said “I eat well”. He gives his daughters everything they need but he said the younger generation “don’t want to work, they want everything to come easy to them, not like me, I always worked hard”. He told us his wife had died from breast cancer on June 15 1990. “She was a very good woman”, and he obviously still missed her. He said he would like to travel but he was almost blind, “My left eye is completely gone with glaucoma and my right eye is not so good”. He told us he lived a few towns away, towards Salerno: “Pompeii belongs to Napoli but my town belongs to Salerno. He pointed out the huge mountains opposite Vesuvius and said that behind them was the Amalfi Coast, which he said is beautiful and that we should go there and that Capri was great too! He said the ferry races they have from the mainland to Capri are a real great event.
Such a great guy. As it came time for the train to arrive I asked him if he was going to Naples and he said “No, I just sit here”. So, he sits on the station all day and helps people and talks to them! He was 68 but looked older, especially because it appeared he had no teeth except one sharp fang sticking out from his lower jaw! We shook hands when the train arrived and he said he’d love to come and see us in Sydney one day. We regretted later that we hadn’t got a photo of him with each of us to remember him by.
Thank goodness our Naples-sidetrack had proved worthwhile. Tomorrow it was back to Rome and then the gruelling flight back to Oz.