Vesuvius

After leaving Pompeii, the tour bus drove us up Mount Vesuvius.  The bus has to make dozens of hairpin turns on a narrow road going up the side of the mountain.  When you are approaching the turn you do not imagine that it would be possible for such a long bus to make it around, but it does every time, occasionally having to force other vehicles to back up out of its way. 

     The buses let the tourists out at a base station where a rocky trail begins which goes up to the rim of the volcano.  It is a hot, dry and pretty steep  trail that goes up in three stages.  At the end of each stage there is a little refreshment stand and some shade.  Looking down one can see the city and the Bay of Naples and , off in the distance the Amalfi peninsula.  On the flank of the present volcano a great ring of lava fields spreads out from the volcano.  The remnants of the old base of the much larger volcano that exploded in 79 A.D.are still are visible. 

     The crater is about a half mile wide, hundreds of feet deep and almost perfectly cone shaped with a floor that looks like you could build a house on it or plant a garden.  Flowering plants and grasses grow around the rim and down inside.  It is said that steaming vents can often be seen but we did not see any the day we were there.  The trail follows the rim about half way around the lower side.  The higher side looks extremely dangerous without a trail or safety railing.  The sides drop straight down and there are places where you can see material has broken off and fallen.  I do not know what geo-physical dynamic creates the perfectly cylindrical shape or the flat plug at the bottom.  And I do not know what it would look like to see that enormous shape fill up with lava before it broke through one of the sides and poured down the mountain.  Evidence of such lava flows are all around.    

Pompeii

                                                      The Amphitheatre in Pompeii

Before we left for Italy, we arranged online for two all day bus tours through a website called Viator.com.  Two days after arriving in Rome we took the metro from our apartment to Piazza del Popolo where several groups waiting for bus tours were gathered under the Egyptian obelisk in the center of the Piazza.  After we had assembled we walked out of the main gate to the roadway and boarded a bus for Pompeii.

     Driving south from Rome the mountains on either side of the highway become noticeably drier, trees giving way to bushes.  The towns seem grafted onto the mountainsides while the broad central valley where the highway is is empty except for industrial buildings and farmland.  We stop for coffee in Cassino at a café with the famed Abbey in view above us.  Our tour guide tells us that the Americans destroyed the Abbey in WWII because they thought the Germans were there, but that it was full of war refugees. 

     We drove on until we got to the ruins of Pompeii.  It is bigger than I expected, acres and acres of buildings and roads, and people that had been buried in ash by the volcano Vesuvius which stands dramatically over the city.  The buildings, according to our guide, exhibit a mix of Greek and Roman construction, as it was initially a Greek ruled area then a Roman city.  You walk the streets from house to house, shop to shop.  There is an area where gladiators were trained, an amphitheater and a great rectangular town commons ringed with collonaded buildings.  The streets are paved with basalt blocks with raised sidewalks also of basalt on either side.  There are crossing areas of basalt stepping stones with the grooves of chariot wheels worn between them.  There are even white reflective stones woven into the pavement designed to reflect the light from torches attached to the walls of the buildings and light the way for night travel.  They had underground sewage, running water in lead pipes, heated floors, and bathhouses.  It is truly like stepping into a city that has been abruptly abandoned and being able to walk into the houses of even the most wealthy and powerful.  You can picture the hustle and bustle of a city, all the business of life taking place on these streets and within these walls, because so much of it is still here including the bones of the dead and the empty jugs once filled with wine or oil.  

Rome

The first thing I noticed about Italy flying into Rome’s Fiumicino airport, (I first tried to remember this as Foo Man Chu airport, but now know it means little river in Italian),   were the umbrella pines and the wheat fields below.  The airport is well outside the city center.  One remarkable thing about Italy is that the cities are densely packed very often within ancient walls and in between the cities is open countryside with no suburban sprawl. 

Our Airbnb host sent a friend to pick us up and bring us into Rome.  The driver’s name was Danielle.  He spoke almost no English but he was friendly and we tried to converse in my broken Italian and his broken English.  It was about a 45 minute ride on fairly conventional, open highways until we reached the city where the streets are narrow and confusing, at least to us.  We drove down a street, paved with stone that ran along a massive wall that ran as far as we could see.  Our apartment was half a block off this street. 

The Mura Aureliane, or Aurelian’s wall gave us our first impression of Rome.  It is massive, maybe 50 feet tall with stone houses and towers on top, and trees and bushes growing out of the cracks.  The entrances to the city through the wall are worthy of an empire in its glory.  The wall completely encircles the old city. 

The Termini station was a ten minute walk along the wall from where we were.  From here you could take a train to another city or get on the subway system to go anywhere inside Rome. 

 Our first full day we used the Metro to explore the city.  We first went to the Colosseum where there were hundreds of tourists waiting in line and many guide businesses who would sign you up to cut the line and give a guided tour of both the Colosseum and the Forum.  We paid them maybe forty Euros for each of us.  Our first guide spoke pretty good English and she  brought  us into the Arena explaining many things as we walked along listening to her on little disposable earphones.  These tours are useful if you have no idea at all where you are or what you’re looking at, which essentially, at least I, did not.  If I went back, I would first read about these places, make notes about what I wanted to  see, buy the tickets in advance and then explore on my own.   But, all in all, the tours were not bad. 

The Colosseum itself is of course, an impressive work of engineering and design.  It is however dark.  And I say this in both senses of the word.  The old stone, except where it has been cleaned, is blackened, and inside between the outer wall of arches and the inner wall of arches it is also dark and dreary.  The viewing areas look out onto the maze of rooms that had been the staging area for the spectacles that took place above on a wooden floor which had been covered with sand to absorb the blood, (thus the word arena, its first meaning is sand).  Here the crowds could watch gladiators fight to the death or see criminals being fed alive to starving lions and tigers.  It is thus perhaps the world’s largest monument to the brutality of mankind.

The Colosseum is within site of the Palatine hill and the Roman Forum.   These are the ruins of the heart of the Roman empire that date from 600 BC to 700 AD.  The Forum is hard to describe.  It is as if someone had taken the buildings of a thousand years of imperial Rome and dumped them together in a junkyard.   

Using Uber

Positano

We used Uber for the first time in Rome when we were leaving the  train station to go to our next scheduled stop in Positano.  It was a hot day, and, although the station wasn’t far from our apartment, we had some heavy luggage to carry so we decided to try it.  I didn’t know the difference between Uber Black and the other choice, Lux?  So I chose Uber Black.  A few minutes later a polite and helpful driver showed up named Massimo in a black BMW with air conditioning.  It was definitely a comfortable ride and  not too expensive. 

In Positano we tried to call another Uber car but none were available.  I am not sure if some cities don’t ban them.  We ended up taking the bus.

On our way home from Boston’s Logan airport we again called for an Uber to take us back to the South Shore.  This time only Uber Black was available, again the ride was comfortable and the driver arrived in a fairly short time.  But the charge to my credit card was over $137 for a 35  minute ride. A taxi would have been cheaper.

We had mixed success with taxis.  We had just dragged our luggage up several hundred steps from the waterfront in Positano to where cars were and were walking down the street somewhat lost when a taxi stopped and picked us up.  He took us up to Montepertuso, he knew exactly where it was from one word from me.  He spoke no English.  The charge, as he took care to show me on his meter, was 37 Euros for a 15 minute ride which he and I both knew was highway robbery, but we had no choice and paid it. 

We used taxis twice in Florence with pretty good results.

The key to using either taxis or Uber is to have an alternative and also to have an idea of what they will charge before you get in.  One tour driver advised us to always put the charge on the meter if it was a taxi because if you ask how much to get to a place the driver is likely to high ball it.  This did happen to us once in Rome when we took a taxi home one night and I readily paid what he said it would be.  Another night, we did the same thing on the meter and it was much lower.  That however did not hold true in Positano.

The Ferries

Montepertuso

At the Naples waterfront, I felt like such a tourist, we bought tickets for the next ferry in an hour, but the vendor said if we ran we could catch the one leaving now which was just leaving.  Pam ran ahead.  I pulled the luggage scrambling after her.  She just managed to stop them from pulling up the gang plank without us.  This ferry was going to Sorrento which was on the way to our destination at Positano.  We were inside and it was hot, the windows barely opened.  It was not what I expected but it got us to Sorrento where we caught another ferry for Capri.  Capri was an unanticipated stop for us.  We had to leave the ferry and wait on the dock for the ferry to Positano.  There were a lot of wealthy tourists and young tourists.  There were pleasure boats in the harbor, hotels clinging to the hillside above the docks and farther up on the white cliffs there were villas precariously perched on the edges of the rock.  The tip of the island that we passed on the way out heading to Positano, had a monument high on the peak of the cliff.   I learned later that it is a statue of the Virgin Mary which is part of a church built on old Roman ruins. 

Passing along the Amalfi coast was one of the best parts of our trip.  The sea is beautiful and feels deep and massive, more so than I thought an arm of the Mediterranean possibly could.  White cliffs ring the whole Amalfi peninsula and built along the waters edge on are stone fortress-like towers.  We wondered if they were from Roman times or from the days when Amalfi was an important trading center. We sailed into Positano at the end of the day when the entire town is in the shadow of the mountains.

We left Positano several days later.  Our Airbnb house was in Montepertuso, right next to the Catholic church.  When we left we waited with our luggage for the bus down the mountain to the beach.  It came and we could barely fit it was crowded with so many people but the driver urged us to get on. We did. 

On the beach we bought tickets for the ferry to Salerno.  This ferry skirted the southern coast of the mountainous peninsula, stopping at the town of Amalfi.  In the middle ages Amalfi was a major trading port.  Today it is a major tourist destination.  It too is built on the sides of the mountains which soar overhead.  From there to Salerno, the land flattens and commercial ships begin to appear outside the port.  We walked with our luggage from the docks about a block into the city to find the train station to catch a train to Venice.