Blog by Tony (Tuesday 13 August, 2019)
Up around 6:30am this morning….was another sleep in for us.
Was a nice sleep in our new accomm. for the next 4 nights. Had some coffee and jam toast for brekky…and am just waiting to see whether we receive a message from a tour guide that we hit up for a private tour of Pompeii today. If we don’t hear from him then we’ll jump on the train, grab a map and do the tour ourselves at our own leisure. We need to be on the train coming back home before the workers do at 3pm…otherwise we’ve been told they’re be no seats for the 45min+ ride home.
I’ve been given the flick and remainder of today’s Blog is by Kellie!
Up early for we are heading off to see Pompeii today, Tony has said there is a message from Raffaele saying that he can do our tour for us which is exciting. This is a place I have wanted to see for a long time.
Off we set to the train station which is packed , we manage to purchase our tickets and it’s not a long wait until we board the express train to Pompeii. The train is also packed full of people and there are no seats to sit down. A nice man has said to me ‘you come and sit here in my seat’ and he will stand. I said no that’s ok but he said no please and gestured for me to sit. Tony is standing just near by poor bugger.
We hop off the train and make our way through stairwells and winding paths and we eventually find Raffaele waiting for us. After our introductions we started off on our tour. Raffaele told us about how the map worked and showed us Mt Vesuvius which started the whole demise of Pompeii and its people.
The great thing about having a tour guide / Archeologist is they know the best parts to go to….for Pompeii is 100+ acres. The old buildings are amazing for you can stand there and just imagine the people back in the day, and you can see where old carts have worn down the stone paving.
The poor people of Pompeii didn’t know what hit them when the volcano erupted. Those people would of suffocated and the heat would of been terrifying burning them. Pompeii was covered in Ash and with all of this ash on top of the city it was buried along with the people, their houses etc.
It was so great to see that some of the colours on the walls were still intact and the mosaic floors still were there and in one of the grand houses there was a marble table that was still there. Raffaele also told us about the wells that were in the city that had lead pipes going to the well. They did not realise that the lead was also poisoning the water and them sending most of them mad.
The sailors would come into the port and they would have a google maps type of effect going on with pictures of bits and pieces pointing the way to the brothel ( oh dear ). They also were clever to have a type of zebra crossing which they built up high with some stones to walk across the street on for underneath was sewage and waste.
The wealthy would live on the bottom floors of the buildings and as the floors went up the poor people would be up the top. We were told that this was because the stairs were made of timber…which people would fall through…and if you broke a leg in those days you were a gonna.
We came across the plaster casts of a couple of an adult, a teenager, a toddler and a dog that had died, from laying there with the ash over them it left a detailed impression of their body and their expressions. It also showed what clothes they had worn and the adult and teenager were recognised to be slaves as they had shackles around their wastes.
The other just a small toddler sleeping. This was very sad to see this but very important for us to see how these poor people once had lived happy in their homes with the sea/port only 600 metres from the entrance.
We continued to look through lots of buildings, the middle of the square and you could see how well they had built their city with so many things withstanding all that ash and volcanic rock upon it.
The day is extremely hot and we are glad that we packed the large frozen bottle of water with us. The couple of hours went by very quickly and it was time for us to finish up. Tony and I were very hungry so we stopped into a little restaurant nearby and had a spaghetti which was very nice. Then upon finishing up there it was time to find the train to take us back and we waited about 25 mins in the heat only to be packed liked sardines in the train. Thank god we were lucky for we had stood right beside the open window which gave us some relief from the heat and the amount of people generating the heat on the train.
We are back at Sorrento at the train station so now it’s only a 10 min walk back to our apartment where we are exhausted but excited about our magnificent day. Thanks heaps to Raffaele for all the info and knowledge he provided for we would of not known what we were looking at without him.