Italy is so. amazing. Have I said that yet? There is just so much STUFF here. We put off Pompeii for a day because we ended up staying at the concert on Saturday until midnight...and whoops, our bus doesn't run after midnight! So, unable to work out the night buses, we had just over a two hour walk back to our hostel. Whoops! Luckily, we were in great moods because the band was fantastic. (haha, Italian cover bands are amazing! This one was "the Beaters"- guess which band they covered- and it totally cracked me up to hear Italian guys imitating British accents. It was so much fun.)
So, Monday we saw the Appian Way, the road that originally lead to Rome some two thousand years ago or so, and the Pantheon. It was a little bit silly because we took a detour off the Appian Way and spent about two hours just frolicking through the Italian countryside. I was a bit confused ("...guys? Isn't there like...other historical stuff we should be doing...?") but they were like, "yay, Roman fields! Let's pretend we're wearing togas" and well, when in Rome. The Pantheon was SO COOL. It was really pretty on the inside, which surprised me a bit- the marble was all painted, and we got to see Raphael's grave, which was really pretty and had a little sculpture of one dove carrying another. We had a really excellent lunch and siesta on the steps, by the way. Siestas are big in Rome, which is pretty fantastic.
Tuesday we finally went to Pompeii! It was so amazing. I didn't realize how much was available for us to see...it really is an entire city. You could see pots and mosaic tilings and astonishingly well preserved fresco paintings and in the Villa of Mysteries we got to see a couple of those fossilized people you always here about. From there we dashed off to catch a train to Herculaneum, because last entry was at 6 p.m. and it wasn't at all hard to spend from noon until 5 seeing as much of Pompeii as we could. We made it to Herculaneum just before 6, and it was much more doable in a short time (much smaller, a town rather than a city), which was a relief. It was so cool to peer out the windows and imagine that you were living in 79 a.d. and looking out from your kitchen and suddenly seeing a flood of people running through the streets. We went on quite a quest for the fossilized rolls we'd heard about (it was like a checklist all day, running around- "okay, houses. We need pots. Oh, some pots! Okay, where's the brothel? oh, that is a LONG line. Okay, peek over the heads, we see inside the brothel. Check. Okay, Villa of Mysteries, where's that famous fresco?" So in Herculaneum we were looking for toast.) We had nearly given up, since it was getting close to closing, but then I spotted some guys with name tags (tour guides?) hanging around, so I asked if they spoke English ("a little") and then tried to explain what we were looking for. It was a bit hard to figure out with the language barrier, but it seemed that the man helping us was actually an archaeologist, or at least someone who really knew his way around, and he was able to show us all the areas that were supposed to be closed off! It was SO COOL. There was a priest (I think) lying in a bed, fossilized, without any glass covering him or anything. It was so cool! There was a wine jug that had been lava-fied and absurdly well preserved fresco paintings where if you covered one eye, they looked three dimensional, and he showed us to touch the marble floors, which were still perfectly smooth. So, so neat. I am so glad we were able to go.
That's pretty much it. It looks like we're staying at a campsite in Venice (we're heading there Thursday), which makes us absolutely delighted.
Love you all bunches,
Sara
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