Meeting time-- 7:30 AM. The cabbie was upset and didn't want to take us to our meeting place because there were only two of us; he had a big car and hadn't eaten brekkie yet. Poor guy. We weren't much better because the Italian Navy convention kept us up until the wee hours with a wild party, music and fireworks outside our window!
So we boarded a tour bus with a group of Spanish, French, Dutch, American, Australian, and English people and drove three hours south to Naples. We had a quick 15-minute bus tour of the harbor and shipyards where WWII bomb raids were still visible on the cracked, pockmarked and dilapidated buildings - over 27,000 bombs were dropped on Naples and the city was nearly destroyed. The island of Capri was barely visible in the hazy distance as we looked out over hundreds of lobster (crab?) pots in the bay!
About this time, our 84-year-old tour guide Franco began regaling us not only with his totally cheese-ball and sometimes inappropriate jokes, but also with his renditions of Strangers in the Night, Embraceable You, and a Stevie Wonder tune. We both felt a little like we got on the geezer bus - not that those songs aren't great - we just did not want to hear our tour guide sing them to us...we also found out that he only eats pasta once a week to help keep his figure. hm. TMI. AND to top it off we were told not to speak on the bus so he wouldn't get confused and make mistakes translating his little facts into the three languages. Which we could understand, but jeeze, don't talk on a tour in a bus for 3 hours? come on.
Besides the crazy guide, and the pushy vendors, Pompeii was magnificent. The ruins are not so much that you can't decipher what happened, but enough to remind you of how the city had been destroyed, and how old it was. Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD and covered Pompeii in 25 feet of ash and cinder. No actual lava hit the city, so the inhabitants were, to put it bluntly, smothered to death. There are casts of all the organic materials found in the hardened ash, including those of people holding their noses, sleeping, dogs all curled up, along with wooden doors, pots, sculptures, etc. Some of the houses still had frescoes on the walls, and most of the square plots of land could be identified as stores, houses, brothels, money changing stations, markets, baths, temples, and court houses. Imagining what the city would have looked like, and been like back then was one of our favorite things to do. We wondered about what they were wearing, what they ate, and how they went about their daily lives. Probably much like we do now. Eat, work, talk with friends, like everyone does.
After 8 hours in the bus today we've decided to walk everywhere from now until we leave Rome. We are super done with buses and tour groups. DONE-ZO.
Tomorrow the forecast is rain. SO! museum day! yesssssss. 1st stop: Edward Hopper exhibition.
