pompeii

today was pompeii day and we were taking the train so hoped we would manage not to be mugged! the walk downhill seemed an awful lot further than described and no sign of the 'bankomat' as promised. finally lou asked a policeman who saluted and buon giouno'd before pointing out the road we should take! and there was the bank machine and my card performed without any problems. it was going to be a good day! a lovely lady at the station bookstall dug around under the counter and found our four tickets for pozzuoli to pompeii. you need four for both journeys. The ticket has to be put into a punch machine as you go through the station and the return tickets don't start their countdown of the allotted ninety minutes until punched by the machine the other end on your way back. confused? we were but getting there! the chap behind the campsite bar gave us all this info and confirmed which train we should catch from napoli-piazza garibaldi. the staff on this campsite are really very helpful....unless you want to use their office phone to ring an english or french bank! :) the ride on the train into and out of naples reminded me strongly of the train rides in and out of the suburbs of chinese cities. the tall blocks of scruffy flats with air conditioners on every balcony and the same rows of washing except these hung along the balconies whereas in china they stuck out from the buildings on bamboo poles! graffiti covered every surface of some of the stations, some of it quite artistic in its way.

passengers who got on were fascinating the way train travellers can be to the curious! two girls who sat opposite lou and i carried on a very melodramatic conversation that, i swear, could not have been done if both girls had had to sit on their hands! :) pompeii station when we got there was a but smarter and lacked so much graffiti but made up for it in souvenir and book stalls and small café/bars. we stopped for lunch as we had been slow getting organised this morning (looking for bancomats plus i had gone and got 'up close and personal' taking photos of the fuming crater...poo, the rotten egg smell is much stronger over there!) and had had a long wait for the train in naples. lou counted 19 stations between naples and pompeii. we had to strap hang too as it was so crowded but great for people watching, of course! :) pompeii is incredible. i'm not sure what I was expecting but it was far more moving than I had anticipated. sadly, a lot of the places the rough guide had whetted my appetite for were closed for ? so I am relying on the book I bought on the way out to fill in the gaps. what we did see was very interesting though and the remains of wall paintings and bread ovens (pizza?) or kilns had the imagination going. there were several tour groups so at certain times we got snippets of information, like the phallic sign above the brothel in one of the 'vias'. i loved the small temple of isis, a quiet spot when we were there.

the streets were possibly the most amazing artefact. laid with enormous slabs of stone with pavements either side, runnels for the waste water and huge stepping stones across the junctions. i've always loved the romans for inventing central heating, perhaps there is an engineer lurking in me somewhere!

in the rare houses we could enter i took photos of small painted details and couldn't resist stroking the painted walls and thinking of the artisan who decorated them nearly two thousand years ago! all very humbling really. finally we fell into the autogrill, yes, really, a motorway caff in the middle of the pompeii ruins. tea with cold milk and a sfogliatelle at last, a pastry filled with ricotta and candid fruit. yum!!

back home the same way but fewer people (why?) for a simple dinner in the van as we are both exhausted. but before we could get into the campsite we had to stop for yet another parade for st genario (patron saint of naples). several men wearing red collars carried his statue aloft while they was preceded by priests in long white robes and the same brass band of yesterday and an enormous incense burner. men and women crossed themselves as the procession passed and the whole thing went up the road beside the campsite and then stopped for prayers over loudspeakers carried on poles. even now i can hear more fireworks going off somewhere. naples has certainly been an experience! :)