They Fell Into A Burning Ring of Fire

On Thursday, we headed off as a three-car caravan for Pompeii, the ill-fated city in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius. We parked in the lot there for free because of a deal offered by Europcar, the agency where we rented three of our four cars. The minute you approach the ticket booths, guides immediately start accosting you, offering their supposedly indispensible services. However, when you purchase tickets for entry into the city, you are given a booklet with information on Pompeii that is numbered to correspond with numbered plaques at all the major sights and buildings in city, and this contains way more than you could possibly absorb already. So, we decided that Sean could do little readings for us out of the book and be our tour guide.

We went a little slow at first, then it became obvoius that these ruins were BFR, so we set a meeting time for our group of dieci-otto (18 people) and split up to cover the sites more efficiently.

This is the main civic building of Pompeii and also the largest structure, where the elected officials administered the laws of the city:

Same building, but this time, this shot has all the cousins together. This trip is the first time in awhile all the cousins have been together!

A lot of the artwork that survived the eruption, including mosaics, was removed from Pompeii to a museum in Naples, but this mosaic remains. I think it's Roman for "Beware of Dog."

Pompeii was just a whole lot bigger than I thought it would be, and it's pretty neat, because they let you walk into almost all of the buildings and go almost everywhere in the city, so it's about as close to being in ancient Rome as you are going to get in 2005. Hidden in some of the nooks and crannies are glass cases with casts of bodies of Pompeiians caught in their last moments before death by ash asphyxiation.

Some more shots of Pompeii:

After we had walked in Pompeii enough that we were walking in circles, we had lunch (pizza, of course!) and then walked back towards the cars. Right by the parking lot was the train station for commuter trains, so we decided to take the train to Herculaneum (Ercolano in Italian), another town that got totalled by Vesuvius.

Although Herculaneum is less well known, we actually thought on the whole it was cooler than Pompeii. It was less crowded, better preserved, and had more interesting buildings. It's also a little smaller and more manageable (partly because they've only excavated 25% of it!), so you can linger a little longer and really take the time to see most everything in a few hours.

There was this weird cave thingy at Herculaneum that had a snake statue in it. I'm not really sure of the significance because I was getting rushed through so fast! All in all, I could have stayed there longer, maybe 2-3 hours happily, to see it all...

That night, we celebrated the March birthday girls: me, my mom, Suzy, Aunt Monica, and Sarah (Bret's girlfriend), by letting two nice Italian women cook for us at the villa!