Southern Italy Part I

A 6:50am flight from Heathrow means a very early start. London’s public transport network doesn’t really crank up until about 5am and the prospect of an hour on the Tube or a selection of Night Buses before dawn didn’t really appeal anyway. So I splashed out and took a cab.

Terminal 2 was a mess. Crowds of people were trying to check-in to Alitalia’s feeble 3 counters and I was stuck with them. On-line check-in was not working for my flights so I couldn’t bypass the queue despite only having carry on luggage. My crawl through T2 pretty much set the tone for my day’s travel. My flight was late leaving London and late arriving in Milan. My onward boarding pass to Naples could not be printed at Heathrow due to some computer glitch, so, I found myself in Milan airport, having to get to a check-in counter to get my boarding pass, face an unusually long queue of people waiting to get through security, and then high-tail it to what I am sure was the farthest departure gate in the airport, only to find my connection was delayed by 45 minutes – something which no monitor in the airport revealed except the one at the gate; and so my love affair with Italian transport began!

Thankfully my day (and whole trip) improved. Landing in Naples I exited the most archaic airport I have ever seen (it reminded me of watching my father arrive at Brisbane airport in the early 80s – planes parked on the tarmac, no aerobridges and a baggage reclaim hall straight out of 1975) into the bright sun of Southern Italy.

A 75 minute bus ride saw me standing on the side of the street in Sant. Agnello about a mile from Sorrento. A 5 minute walk later and I was at my hotel and, shortly after, opening the curtains in my room to reveal the looming bulk of Vesuvius across the Bay. It seems a bit of a cliché but it truly dominates the landscape wherever you are on, or around, the Bay of Naples.

I arrived having already decided what to see, but not when. The weather forecast had been average, with showers predicted for most of the weekend, so I was pleasantly surprised with the sunshine. I decided to take advantage and strike for Pompei the in the morning.

Pompei has its own train station on the Circumvesuviana Line to Sorrento - the line itself is another story, boring its way through the hills of the Sorrento peninsular - but I think a bit about Pompei…

Surprisingly, you enter the city from below. I always imagined a rather large hole in the ground full of crumbling ruins (which Herculaneum delivers quite nicely by the way) instead you find a city rising above you on a hilltop, which still holds a commanding position over the surrounding county-side. There is far too much to describe here. With only about 60% of the buildings shown on my guide map actually open to the public, it still took me a good 6 hours to work my way around the site …and those buildings open to the public are a miniscule percentage of the exposed city, some 60 or 70 buildings out of thousands (and that, of course, does not include the 50% of the city still under the ground patiently awaiting an archaeologist’s trowel).

The Villa of Mysteries is impressive. Located outside the old city it has been extensively restored and conserved. Its roof has been rebuilt and its famous frescos are still in place (in may parts of the city they were removed). It allows you to feel how a Roman Villa actually is to be in; the bright courtyards with their shady colonnades, the dark, cool inner rooms and the symmetry of an important Roman house. However I find it a little disturbing to walk over mosaic floors that are starting to crumble and break under the thousands of visiting feet every year, and very little apparent effort to halt the decay. It is an issue noticeable across the site. Contemporary graffiti is mixed with that of the ancient variety, carved into frescoed walls and soft stone. Clearly the task of protecting and conserving the site in enormous, but it still a pity to see.

The rest of the houses are inside the city walls and are packed in. The city is remarkably dense. The streets have no parks or gardens, the houses crowd right up to the roadway, which much have made for sweltering streets (and probably still does if you were to dare to visit in the heat of August!). It’s only once you get inside a house that you get greenery and some respite from the hard stone of the pavements.

The city has everything a self respecting Roman could want; an agreeable climate, close proximity to the Bay of Naples, a couple of theatres, a stadium, numerous temples, market places, baths and the odd brothel thrown in. Who could want anything more? Although maybe the imposing view of the nearby volcano was something they could have done without…