We are heading south to Rome. We have 4 nights booked right in the heart of the old city, so easy walking to lots of sights. We aren’t expecting long queues at the various venues either. Weather forecast for mid-teens for the next week, so a little warmer than Sweden. We are at the airport awaiting the flight. Jill is annotating our Lonely Planet guide to pick the highlights to visit.

Day 1. Arrive. Baggage collected we head to the SIT airport express bus that gets us to near the Vatican, as close as we can get to our accommodation which is an apartment right in the historic centre… in a maze of little twisty passages all alike… with no vehicle access until after 6PM. Fortunately, towing our bags over the cobbled streets, we finally found it (GPS has problems when all you can see of the sky is a thin ribbon 4 or 5 storeys up). Once set up we had a wander around the local streets in the gathering night, all very interesting.

Day 2. Off to the Vatican, dodging the touts for guided tours… there are so many of them and all are very pestilient. As expected for early morning, Wednesday (everyone is heading to the Pope’s address somewhere every Wednesday) in the low season there are no queues (except for the guided tours where everyone seemed to be hanging around waiting, looking glum). A quick twirl around the Vatican museums took most of the day, and we barely touched the surface of what is there – mostly we just gawped at the opulence and artistry. They had a special display of Rembrandt drawings – I wouldn’t mind one or two of them on my wall. I assume they are worth millions of dollars each.

St Peter’s Square from the cupola on the Dome of St Peter’s Basilica

Day 3. Off early again, this time to St Peter’s Basilica, dodging more tour guide touts, and sellers of selfie sticks. No queues again – people don’t get up early round here. Up, up, up – 321 steps to the inside of the dome. Sadly the walkway there is fenced off with heavy duty wire with narrow gaps, so not so conducive to photography. But this place is HUGE. The people on the floor below appeared tiny. The dome has a diameter of over 40 m and rises high above. There is a narrow stairway climbing between the inner and outer shell of the dome that takes you up to the cupola on the top. From here there are amazing views over Rome (somewhat muted by the layer of smog). Then down, down, down to the Basilica floor below and the crypt below to be awed by the gold and splendour.

Day 4. Another beautiful sunny day. We headed off for a gentle walk around the Colosseum, Palatine Hill and Forum. Those old Romans really knew how to party. Sadly the buildings are mostly ruins now (after 2 millenia I guess you can expect a little wear and tear). The elaborate marble that was once fixed to the walls has gone – recycled on other constructions over the ages, leaving rough brick or stone. But the scale is HUGE. The Palatine hill was where the Emperor and other VIP’s lived and the reconstructions in the museum show amazing architecture. Our word Palace derives from the Palatine.

We also visited the Trevi Fountain, a spectacularly sculptured monument. This is clearly THE place to be after dark. The area facing the fountain was jam packed. I guess there isn’t much on television on Friday nights so what else do you do in Rome?

Day 4. Today is a quiet day to catch up after the frenzy of the last few weeks. Another lovely day with sun and blue sky. Amazing luck. After a sleep-in we wandered along the narrow twisty roads towards the “Spanish Steps” which are a famous landmark. The steps are large, ornate, branching marble steps with a fountain at the bottom and a church across the road at the top. And a gazillion tourists. Then we headed on to the grounds of the Villa Borghese – huge areas of parklands and buildings, mansions etc. We visited a few of the galleries, enjoyed wandering around, then headed home via the Spanish Steps. Did I say they were crowded when we went up.  They were crowded to the power of 10 when we went down. The road leading to them was just a surging mass of humanity. Amazing. This seems to be the neighborhood for designer labels – Cartier, Louis Vuitton, Bulgari etc etc. We asked a local police officer if this was normal and she said it was a fairly typical Saturday there. Maybe a little busier than normal because Christmas was a week away. Time for dinner than an early night in preparation for heading south to Pompei in the morning.

Lots and lots of photos at https://goo.gl/photos/wCp2cn2j78DYKNwo9

Enjoy.

We took a rental car down the coast. Some coastal “resort” development along the long Mediterranean beaches with a lot of new building going on. Lots of cars, not much parking, all of which is packed (and this is the low season — it must be hell in summer). Seems typical. One wonders why the city planners don’t think to mandate sufficient parking space to accommodate the need as new buildings go up.

Then out of the suburbs into coastal scrubland – very interesting looking. The road wends its way through small towns and some agricultural areas, with some interesting coastal scenery in places. We are travelling at what we think is a sensible speed only 10-20 kph faster than the signposted speed limit; and still people are banking up behind us and passing us on double white lines… Italian drivers…! Then, time pressing to get to our destination, we head inland to the freeway towards Pompei. We arrive on time, find our accommodation: comfortable but chilly – not the well-insulated constant 22°C that we have been used to indoors in Sweden.

gardens in one of the mansions

storeroom of artefacts

We spend our first day exploring the famed Pompei ruins. The town and its inhabitants were buried during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79, preserving a snapshot of Roman life under metres of volcanic ash. This is an amazing place, well deserving of the UNESCO World Heritage Site listing, and we spent all day there. The skies were overcast, but fortunately the rain held off until quite late in the day so wasn’t a real problem. There are lots of mansions etc on display, some with spectacular decorations (especially considering they are about 2000 years old) as well as lots of temples, shops, brothels, etc. etc.. Although the guide map  gives paths to take for 1, 2 or 4 h, we spent over 7 hours there and could easily have spend more time without getting bored.

Burnt bread, Pompei

Herculaneum, showing depth of the old docks from the current surface

Herculaneum; skeletal remains

Next morning dawned still overcast so we don our raincoats and head to Heraculaneum by train – it’s only 20 km or so by road, but neither Jill nor I thought it was worth the risk to life to mix with the lunacy of Italian drivers, and the parking, based on our experience, was likely to be hard to find. And the train was fine. The ruins were buried by a cooler flow of ash, so there is more preservation of organic structures. In places beams, doors and the like are still there – charred but recognisable. Burnt loaves, fruit, grain and other seeds and so on give a picture of everyday life (though we didn’t see much of this at Heraculaneum, but in one of the few museological displays in Pompei). Walls are more intact overall. Heraculaneum was a port town, and the entrance to the site is by a ramp at current ground level, from which you can look down to the excavated dockside structures. It gives a good impression of the depth of the ash burying the town. Here they also have a good display of the “gruesome bits” – remains of the previous inhabitants effectively fossilised as they died. However, here the initial eruption left only a few cm of ash on the town and the majority of the inhabitants fled. It was the following night when a series of 6 pyroclastic flows came over the town – at about 250°C it was probably the heat that killed the remaining residents.

Pompei, Hermaphroditus statue (a siezed fake antiquity)

We returned to the train back to Pompei, and since the station was close to the other enterance to the one we used yesterday we give it another try and found a corner of the site we had missed getting to before. Here are some interesting buildings, mosaics and paintings. Eventually we find the “antiquarium” mentioned on a sign post. We discover we have to go through a small corridor with no signs at the back of the bookshop and go up one floor or down one floor for the two sets of displays. Another vagary of the Italian way of doing things. There are some interesting items on display from various archaeological excavations and including a display of faked “ancient Roman artefacts” from various seizures by the Italian art police.

Heading back to our apartment we pass another fine example of Italian creative parking. Here is a car parked perpendicular to the kerb, half on the footpath to get the tail from totally blocking the road, in a gap betwen the parallel-parked cars that was there because it was a zebra crossing. I wonder how many fines/demerit points that would get in Australia.

Boscoreale – Roman olive press

Our third day, we pack up for our return to Rome via Boscoreale where there is a museum with artefacts from the local digs, plus a Roman farm they have recently dug from the ash. The 5 km drive there through the streets probably took 2 years off our lives as we contended with narrow roads with stone sides and lots of intruding lamp posts, power poles, house corners and so on, and lots of Italian drivers, cement-trucks and garbage trucks. Jill, behind the wheel, did an amazing job and we survived unscathed. Once at the museum we were surprised to find that there was parking, and amazingly, it was free. Boscoreale museum is small, but has lots of pots, bottles, art, sculptures, geology and so on, though almost exclusively with descriptions only in Italian that we have to muddle through with guesses as to the meanings.

Naples urban sprawl from Mt Vesuvius. Urban development spreads way to the right of what is shown in the photo.

Then we headed off and, given we had time, took a punt on getting to the top of Vesuvius. More narrow roads full of homicidal Italian drivers. Two hands on the steering wheel is rare. If there is a passenger, one hand will be gesticulating wildly as they speak (they also do this when they talk on the phone, so presumably they have a haptic feedback system on the phones that transfers the hand gestures to the phone at the other end of the connection); or they will be holding a phone to their ear. I made a quick tally for a minute or so on one of the local roads, and almost 50% of drivers were holding a phone to their ear; the remainder had a cigarette in one hand (it seemed like almost everyone smokes profusely here, and the streets are consequently littered with cigarette butts because littering is a national pass-time); and sometimes it was phone + cigarette and/or gesticulation and god only knows who was doing the steering. Somehow we managed to make it to the right road and wend our wiggly way up to the carpark where we left tha car for the final 3 km climb to the summit. From there we interesting views into the crater (alas, no bubbling lava, just a big hole full of volcanic ash, with a few thin tendrils of steam from a couple of places round the rim), and extensive views over the surrounding area. Naples is one huge urban sprawl – perhaps not surprising given that it is a city of around 1 million.

Venice and surounds. Venice lies on the small island in the middle of the bay.

A comfortable overnight near the airport gave us a relatively low-stress return to the car-rental then on to the plane. Flying north over Italy was interesting – a geography lesson, as we plotted our route on the map, picking out places like Venice through the distance haze. Then snowcapped alps, and then, unfortunately, just a sea of cloud tops until Stockholm.

Lots of photos at https://goo.gl/photos/NxWnyPqwzvcLwEQP7