I thought I might get some more chances to post but me and my colleagues have kept busy in the evenings with dinners with our customers and such, so there hasn’t really been much worth posting about. Most of the time business trips end when the work is over but because this is Italy me and some of my colleagues decided to stay some days extra. I’ve also promised my wife to take her to Pompeii and this was a good opportunity.

Renegade wife arrived already on Friday evening and joined us for dinner. Yesterday our little group dispersed, one colleague going home to Taiwan and two others going off to Venice, while me and the wife set off for Napoli.  We arrived in the evening and where too tired after our trip to do much. Today we had one mission: to fulfill Yini’s long time dream of seeing Pompeii. We set off in the morning on the small local train to Pompeii, and after a bit of delay we arrived.  They say the visit should take about two hours but it took us more than double that, I guess we were very thorough in our exploration. Yini was very happy to finally be here, and even though I was here when I was young, I still enjoyed myself.

  • Lots of people in the Forum, near the entrance
  • Vesuvius in the background 
  • Wine amphorae in the storage rooms
  • Plaster cast of a dead child
  • The front porch of a house
  • Inside the baths 
  • One of the pools inside the baths
  • Beautiful mosaic and garden in the background
  • Ancient roman pizza oven
  • Happy Yini
  • More happy Yini
  • The villa of mysteries

A dead man buried by the eruption

  • From the theater.
  • The acoustics in the theater are amazing
  • Hugging a pillar
  • Beautiful old houses
  • Another beautiful house
  • The outside of the stadium, too bad we couldn’t go in 

Some of the many frescoes 

When we had seen pretty much everything in Pompeii (ok, there is more but some of it is blocked due to construction and so on), we were getting tired and our feet were sore. However, we had some hours left so we decided to go to the second town that was destroyed in the same volcanic eruption, Herculaneum. This was a much smaller town than Pompeii but as I understand it, it was richer and the houses more decorated. We walked around there for a bit more than an hour. It was very similar to Pompeii but still fun to see.

  • Herculaneum ruins from above
  • Yini in front of the ruins 
  • I wonder what’s down there
  • Pillars and garden
  • Dark alley
  • Us in front of the gymnasium
  • Inside the gymnasium
  • Street with pillars

Some beautiful frescoes and mosaics 

Just as we were finishing our tour of Herculaneum it started to rain so we sped up slightly and headed down to what used to be the sea shore. There we came upon a number of ancient boat houses and in there we found a large number of skeletons, frozen in the position the people died in.  Kind of macabre to see but it gave me a very solemn feeling, a kind of mix between respect for the dead and a sense of historic significance.

Skeletons in Herculaneum boat houses.

When we got out from the ruins we were hungry and exhausted from all the walking (I think the step counter in Yini’s phone registered more than 25000 steps), so we got some dinner at a local restaurant then headed home to our hotel.