The ride to Naples took one hour and ten minutes. Matt slept, Beth played games on her iPod Touch, and I read the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle on my iPhone. (Still no luck finding Wifi, but I've been able to download them onto a flash drive at the internet point and transfer them to the iPhone via John's laptop.)
About halfway to Naples, I realized that I had left the guidebook sitting on the dining table, instead of putting it in our bag for the day. We had the Pompeii information saved on my iPhone, but nothing for Naples! Despite that setback, we were able to find our way to the Circumvesuviana train (I love the name!), and I managed to buy four round-trip tickets to Pompeii in Italian. I even remembered to ask what track the train was coming on, and understood the answer.
We ended up on an express train to Pompeii, which only made three or four stops, so we entered the gates of Pompeii by 9:45 am.
Pompeii was amazing!
The Temple of Jupiter:
The Basilica:
The Forum:
The body casts:
The mosaics:
The frescoes:
A very impressive place:
We were very pleased when we left around 1:00--the temperature had gone up considerably, and the place was thronged with tourists. We avoided all of that by getting up early!
The trip back to Naples was on a slower train that made all the stops in between, but it was nice to get off of our feet for a while. Pompeii is a hard place to walk--the stones are large, smooth, and very uneven (I guess 2000+ years will do that to a road), and it was hard to not slip on them.
In Naples, we had the Archaeological Museum on our schedule, since that's where a lot of the good art from Pompeii has ended up. The lack of a guidebook slowed us down for a bit, as I didn't know the name of the street the museum was on, or the name of the metro stop. It finally occurred to me to stop by the big bookstore in the train station and flip through a guidebook or two. We decided the route looked short enough to walk, so we wrote down the names of all the streets (there were only two, but they had five names along the way) and were off. Well, after a stop at McDonald's--the little sandwiches I had packed for lunch were long gone, and our growing kids were hungry AGAIN.
We were not very impressed with Naples. The sidewalks near the train station had a pretty design (little square basalt tiles, with white ones inlaid in a wave pattern), but the rest was not attractive. Dreary apartment buildings, grimy streets, and people driving their scooters on the sidewalks.
At the museum, we saw room after room of amazingly well-preserved artifacts from Pompeii: statues, silver, glass, and more. We saw Roman sculptures. We saw a lot of Roman busts with their noses glued back in place--I guess that's a common thing to break off. (No need to mention the other, ahem, thing that tends to break off...)
In the end, the museum was disappointing. Not worth the twenty-minute hike from the train station, and certainly not worth the 40 Euros we paid to get in. The problems was that the most interesting art from Pompeii (the mosaics and the erotic art) were in a wing that was closed for renovations:
We decided that it would be fun to look at the Egyptian art instead, since we blew past the Egyptian art at the Vatican. No luck, the lower level was also closed (with no signs indicating why). So, we decided we'd seen enough Roman statues to last a lifetime, and headed back to the station.
At the Metronapoli station, we couldn't figure out what line or what stop to take to get back to the train station, so we ended up walking back.
Our train was there waiting for us. First-class train travel is definitely nicer than second class. This time, we got a set of four seats facing each other with a table in between. The seats are wide and cushy, the WCs are clean (and stocked with TP!), and in first class you get a drink and snacks.
On the way home, we took the Metro again. During rush hour. We somehow managed to jam ourselves onto the train, although it was close enough that we made sure both kids knew to get off at the next station. Matt was wedged up against the door, and none of us had to hold on to anything, as there was no room to fall.
Since this is our last night in the apartment, I took a couple of pictures as we got closer:
And one inside:
I did as much laundry as possible in the washer. In Paris, we will be back to the bathroom-sink method.
We played Hearts again tonight, and Matt won. The kids enjoyed our first game so much that they've been asking to play every night, but we just haven't had the time. It really cuts into your evening when dinner doesn't start until 7:30 or 8:00!
