On Sunday, we spent a day in Sorrento and Pompeii, which is an absolutely beautiful region. There’s a reason so many people lived in Pompeii (close to 15,000), which is hilly surrounding a large harbor which is spectacular. There’s lemon and olive groves everywhere. The Sorrento lemons grow the size of a football, they are huge, and almost everything is flavored with lemons.
On a side note, driving here is super crazy, I am so glad we paid for drivers or are taking tours. If they have traffic laws, they seem to uniformly ignore them. Crossing streets is a treacherous adventure.
We live in Colorado so we are used to stunning vistas, but Sorrento took our breathe away. We spent a long time just sitting in stunned silence.
Mt. Vesuvius is centered in the bay and dominates the landscape. Pompeii was originally a seaside town but is now about an half an hour from the sea and is above the city of Napoli. The site of Pompeii is absolutely huge. I had no idea it was such a large town. In 90 minutes, we only walked about a 1/4 of the site.
Another really interesting point about Pompeii is that they found about 2,000 bodies but they think 15,000 people lived in the town, so they estimate that 13,000 people escaped.
I was fascinated by the streets in Pompeii. They had no underground sewer system, but the entire town is on a slope so the down hill streets were the sewer system. The cross streets were set higher and there were large rocks for people to cross over without stepping into the dirty streets. There were drinking fountains every so often and were designed to spill over into the street to continually clean the sewage. My kids laughed at my fascination. It was just such good planning!
I also didn’t realize how long it took archeologists to find Pompeii. They knew Pompeii existed from historical records, but as it was so buried, they couldn’t find it. If you look at the picture below you can see a more “modern” building (in Italy, more modern is 1700) and is so much higher. Many of these historical sites, like the Roman Forum, were entire buildings underneath entire buildings.
The remaining mosaics were amazing and the kids were impressed by their level of detail. Much more detailed than the mosaics they made in MFW CtG.
