Interrail throughout Italy

Milan - Padua - Verona - Venice - Florence - Saint Gimignano - Sienna - Pisa - Naples - Pompei - Amalfi Coast - Capri - Assisi - Rome - Tivoli - Monaco

You arrive to Pompeii by the Circumvesuviana train (that outskirts the volcano) from Naples in 30-45 min.
These are the best Roman ruins that I have ever seen, much better than the Roman forum. Even if you don't like to visit neither sites nor "stones" I would recommend it to let you get marvelled. Pompeii has a magnificent conservation state since a Vesuvius eruption buried the whole town completely for centuries. You can make a clear idea of how they lived in the olden ages because you move through the streets, the houses and the civil buildings. Try to bring a guide (book or person) that explains everything, as it is worth. If you forgot it, you have always the recourse of jumping from one tourist group to other listening to the guide while you look distractedly to other part. I know it for experience, as there is a huge difference between visiting stones or visiting the superb Roman city that so much information has supplied the historians with.
I warn you from the beginning. The heat is suffocating. You have to walk much and there are fewer shadows. Perhaps I would say that this was the Italian spot where the weather was the hottest.
Pompeii was founded in the 6th century B.C. and it developed quickly due to its key geographic position. In the 89 B.C. it became a Roman colony. It lost its autonomy but it experienced an incredible flourishing, reaching the cipher of 30.000 inhabitants.

An immense earthquake in 63 A.C. that caused serious damages interrupted this splendour but Pompeii managed to recover from. However, the 24th of August in 79 A.C. a terrible eruption of the Vesuvius buried Pompeii and the close Herculaneum under a 7 meter thick layer of rocks and ashes. Pompeii had 30.000 citizens at this moment and many of them saved the life. In 1748 the digging up works started and still nowadays they go on.

When you see the scenery it is difficult to imagine how a far volcano could devastate a city.

It is possible to distinguish hotels, inns, post offices, houses (from the more ancient and simpler to the most luxurious and decorated ones), palaces, warehouses, shops and many public buildings: the temples, the spas, the market, the theatres, the forum, the amphitheatre, the gladiators barracks, etc.

You feel the sensation of being in a modern city, with the same facilities, the same way of life, buildings, customs and leisure; but uninhabited.

The amphitheatre (very ancient, from 1st century B.C.) and the two theatres remain in an excellent state of conservation, whereas the forum is more damaged. There are big houses that belonged to the burgesses, very interesting because of the frescoes, statues, gardens and patios.
The several sorts of shops and taverns are visited.

Depending on the number of slabs you know if this street was one-way (one slab) or two-way (three slabs). The wheels of the carts circulated at both sides of the slab. Thus, three slabs allowed two carts and hence four wheels at the same time.

They are still visible the water canals that fed the fountains. On the walls there are many graffiti that give us information about the quotidian life, including verses, insults, gods invocations or even a joker that wrote: oh, wall, I admire that you support so many stupidities without crumbling!.

Unconsciously Pompeii had been erected over a terrain formerly originated by lava stream expulsed centuries ago by the volcano. A cloud of gigantic proportions difficult to imagine hit the city, it was composed of poisonous gases, ashes, rocks and incandescent stones that buried Pompeii and many of the inhabitants without the time to escape. In fact the archaeologists have been able to modulate in gypsum, the inside of the cavities that the buried bodies left in the ashes, and thus they have recreated the dramatic and despaired positions that they acquired in the last instants. Pay attention at the low height of the people in these ages.

All the information has been obtained from only one third of the city, as the rest continues under the ground very deep.
If you have visited Pompeii in the morning I suggest that you go to the Amalfi coastline in the afternoon to have a bath and to refresh for a while.