09/03: Naples and Pompeii

The next day Court and I awoke and rushed through our breakfast. Our stop - Naples. A city known as the crime capital of Italy. A city where visiting it is considered a success if you make it out without being killed by mobsters or being horribly maimed by moped drivers. The following photo is a good example of the daily life of one of Naple's native sons:
Now you can see why Mario moved away from Italy. That and because of the mushroom addiction. But I digress ...

But despite my spectacular description of Naples, most tourists skip right over Naples and head for one of the worlds archaeological gems - Pompeii. The ancient Roman city along with its neighboring city Herculaneum were destroyed and buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius on August 24th, AD 79. It lay buried until being discovered in 1748. Here's Courtney in an ancient courtyard with Mt. Vesuvius behind us.
People were engulfed so suddenly and quickly that archaeologists were able to take plaster molds of the cavities from where their bodies once were ... creeeeeepy.

An ancient amphitheater. I don't know if the theater quite achieved the level of high brow theater that Jon and the rest of the FUCT team brings to the stage, but I'm sure they did what they could.
Many of the frescos on the walls of homes survived the eruption.
We then approached Pompeii's arena, which apparently was able to hold 20,000 fans, which doesn't put it much under Martin stadium. Here's the hallway that the ancient gladiators walked before entering the stadium. Legend has it they slapped the sign on their way in.



We had started the day planning on hiking up Vesuvius, but it had to be in the 90's and after spending several hours walking through Pompeii, the thought of hiking a mountain made us both die a little inside. Instead we hit the train back into Naples and headed to a fantastic pizza place. Naples is known as the birthplace of pizza and we were not disappointed. We walked into what looked like a little dive (suggested by Lonely Planet) and saw some small pizzas in the front window. Seeing this, plus the fact that the prices were between 4 and 6 euro we thought that was what we were getting. Instead, when we ordered 2 pizzas we got 2 monstrous pizzas. They were amazing. That + the 3 euro bottle of wine made this probably the most amazing meal we had on our trip.
After savoring our lunch we wandered around town, by chance finding the Duomo/Cathedral open which was fantastic because
a) The artwork and architecture were exquisite
b) It was 20 degrees cooler inside
After this we wandered our way back to the boat and entered weary but content that we got our money's worth.

Stop #3: Rome