Pompeii

On Friday morning we were all supposed to be on the chartered bus at 7:00 to depart for Pompeii, but one roomful of students failed to appear on time. Jonathan had to go roust them from their room; they claimed they had never gotten the message about the early departure. So it was about 7:15 before we actually pulled away from the hotel. It was a three-hour drive to Pompeii, and by the time we arrived, it was raining lightly. Edward and William were transfixed by the knowledge that they were looking at a real volcano, and the resemblance to smoke of the cloud bunched around the top of Vesuvius only added to their excitement.

This was our first experience with a tour where the guide spoke to us through radio headsets. We had often seen groups using this technology in Florence and Rome, and I think on the whole it worked fairly well. It certainly would have been nice to have in the Vatican Museums when there was no way the people on the fringes of our group could possibly have heard Dr. Gardner or me. Jonathan told us that his father was considering investing in a set for the program to use on a permanent basis. Our Italian guide took us to most of the significant sites in the ruins, with the amphitheater being an obvious exception. There were a number of other tour groups there that day, so the going was slow at points, particularly in the public baths. The entire tour lasted about two hours. Unfortunately, we had no opportunity for independent exploring; as this was my fourth visit to the ruins, it was no tremendous loss to me, but I'm sure some of the students would have enjoyed looking around on their own.

We ate lunch at a cafeteria-style restaurant outside the ruins and had some time to shop for souvenirs. I bought a little book for Edward that had imaginative overlays of shots of the ruins to show what the city may have looked like in the first century. The price was a hefty 14 euros because it included a DVD that covered not only Pompeii, but also Herculaneum and the Villa Jovis on Capri. Edward looked at the book for much of the six-hour journey back to Citerna.

The tedium of our return trip was ameliorated by a couple of movies Jonathan played for us on the bus's system. We arrived just after dark, a little before 8:00, and had supper waiting for us. It felt great to be "home" again!