The journey to Pompeii was pretty straightforward, well, it should have been. After a half an hour train journey we pulled in at Pompeii and went to depart the train. Yet the doors wouldn’t open, we ran through to the next carriage only to find a Brazilan couple trying to force their exit. We all ran through to the next carriage, only for the train to start pulling away.
A quarter of an hour later we managed to exit at the next station, finally forcing open one of the few functional doors. After a forty minute wait for the next train we made the ten minute trip back to Pompeii.
We finally arrived and made our way to our hostel. There was a real community atmosphere, and we were instantly made to feel welcome. The hostel was modern and clean, by far the best we had stayed in so far.
Located minuted from the piazza, which was a real community hub. Old folks were sitting around the fountain, couples strolling through the gardens and youngsters playing freely everywhere. This is the Italy i imagined…
As the sun disappeared behind the Duomo we enjoyed some Italian cuisine in a restaurant just off the piazza. It was such a relaxing welcome after the hustle and bustle of Rome.
There is plenty to to in Pompeii. The new town is quite normal, in that the high streets and piazzas are similar to many all across Italy, yet the atmosphere is something to be savoured.
The old town hides a secret and distressing past. The town was destroyed, and completely buried, during a catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Pompeii remained lost for nearly 1700 years before its accidental rediscovery in 1748. Since then, its excavation has provided an extraordinarily detailed insight into the life of a city at the height of the Roman Empire.
During early excavations of the site, occasional voids in the ash layer had been found that contained human remains. Giuseppe Fiorelli realised these were spaces left by the decomposed bodies and so devised the technique of injecting plaster into them to perfectly recreate the forms of Vesuvius’s victims. What resulted were highly accurate and eerie forms of the doomed Pompeiani who failed to escape, in their last moment of life, with the expression of terror often quite clearly visible.
After spending a day wandering the site of old Pompeii i would recommend taking the trip up to Vesuvius, the only volcano on the European mainland to have erupted within the last hundred years. The area around Vesuvius was officially declared a national park on 5 June 1995.
The summit of Vesuvius is open to visitors and there is a small network of paths around the mountain that are maintained by the park authorities on weekends. There is access by road to within 200 metres of the summit (measured vertically), but thereafter access is on foot only. There is a spiral walkway around the mountain from the road to the crater.
After exploring the old town and the Volcano that destroyed it, it is worth relaxing in the vibrant new town. Yet maybe not for too long, as Vesuvius is regarded as one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world because of the population of 3,000,000 people now living close to it and its tendency towards explosive eruptions.
