This was the day we had planned to visit Pompeii, and given how much time we had spent at Herculaneum and how hot it had felt by the end, I thought it important that we start as early as possible. We were up at 7:00 (not difficult, since it was another night of very shallow and sweaty sleep); we showered, dressed, packed, sunscreened the kids, drank a bit of water, and were out of the apartment by 7:45.
As before, we decided to walk to the Circumvesuviana station instead of taking a bus. We headed up Corso Umberto I, then along the side streets Via G. Mattei and Via G. Savarese, which split off to the south and aim directly at Stazione Circumvesuviana. Just before reaching Corso Garibaldi, N spotted a small cafe which was open, and suggested we get some food for the children, who were looking rather sad. I went in, asked for four cornetti to go, and a coffee. The coffee was not bad, though while I was drinking it, a basket descended from an upper window and bonked N on the head while she was waiting outside with the kids. The owner put some food in it, and up it went again.
We rushed into the station, and I bought tickets while N looked at the schedule and on the list of departing trains. One was leaving in two minutes and seemed right; we dashed down the stairs and caught it with seconds to spare. It turned out to be an express, making only four stops before Pompeii (the train we had taken to Herculaneum stopped at every station and took about as long). We were out of the Scavi di Pompeii station at 8:35, five minutes after the excavations opened.
There were already tour groups clustering at the entrance. The lineup for tickets was relatively short, but local "guides" kept pushing in at the front waving wads of cash and yelling at the sellers. I bought the tickets for all of us while N took the kids into the small air-conditioned bookstore. She didn't find anything better than what we already had, but she had spent a lot of time studying the book on Pompeii we had picked up at the Archaeological Museum. Her judgement was that it wasn't quite as good as the Herculaneum book, and furthermore, it lacked a decent map. She found one for about L.4000 that seemed to be a good complement. The books we had were quite recent, but the covers looked quite old-fashioned, and in neither site did we see anyone else using them.
Again, I will not go into specifics of what we saw. The Pompeii book had three itineraries in it; it said the first took three hours, the second five hours, and the third all day. We hoped that was cumulative rather than additive, but at any rate N had gone through the second and third and picked out highlights we could see if we needed to bail out sooner.
Just as in Herculaneum, we managed to see most of what we wanted, since many of the places turned out to be locked. N would read out a street address (all streets were labelled and all buildings numbered), we would spot it, see if we could get in, and then N would tell us what to look for. Sometimes I took the book and fulfilled that role. The general layout and details were very familiar from our previous site visits, though some aspects were different. Pompeii was larger and more spaced out than Herculaneum -- closer to Ostia Antica in this respect -- and few buildings had second stories, since the site was only partly buried by ash and the taller structures suffered erosion and looting.
We kept to the shade whenever possible, took water breaks, and snacked on grapes from time to time. The fountains at many corners had been refitted with plumbing, and we could splash water over ourselves or even have a cool drink. The kids were blithely referring to things like peristyles, atria, nymphaea, and could also recognize the four different periods of wall painting, even the second and third, of which we had seen very little (but they had been told about the differences in style).
There were many tour groups, more as the day wore on. They were from cruise ships docked nearby, from which they had been bused to the site. None appeared to be American; many were English, some French, some Spanish, and of course Chinese and Japanese groups. I was not happy to learn that the French, so collected and calm in their own country, could be just as boorish as any stereotypical "ugly American". It was not as possible as at Herculaneum to avoid the clots of people. The biggest concentration was near the Lupanare, one of the brothels and the only one that appeared to have been built expressly for the purpose. It consisted of a few small cubicles with naughty frescoes above, like cheap versions of the ones we had seen in the Secret Cabinet -- hardly worth queueing and pushing for.
At 11:40 we started heading back towards the centre; there was a restaurant on site, unlike the other sites, enabling us to fuel ourselves. We knew the food was not going to be anything special, but they must have worked hard to make it so actively bad. The wine (Vesuvio DOC), the watermelon, and the bottled water was decent, but everything else was wretched; substandard cannelloni, dull mozzarella with tomatoes, tasteless squid and octopus salad, and L.72000 for the lot. At least we beat the rush.
After lunch, we headed out to the southeast, to see the small amphitheatre (we decided to skip the larger one, being somewhat overdosed on amphitheatres), the Odeon, and then we headed northwest again, to where the necropoli were. We exited the main excavation site and went into the Villa of the Mysteries. This had one terrific room with a whole cycle of somewhat surreal frescoes depicting ritual mysteries (no one is quite sure which ones). Out past a souvenir shop, and we were done. It was about three o'clock; we had been at the site for six hours, not counting the lunch break, and had done justice to maybe two-thirds of the items on the three itineraries.
In a touristy restaurant near train station we ordered granitas, which came out of a machine and dinged us for L.3000 each. At the station, we had a choice of sitting in a slightly stuffy waiting room or standing in the sun on the platform (but there was some breeze); we rested our feet, and the kids sat and read until the train came. It was a milk run, stopping at every station, but we had seats in the shade, and were in no hurry.
As we left the Circumvesuviana station, a somewhat dazed woman wearing a heavy jacket but carrying nothing else asked me if I spoke English and could I tell her where to get the train back to Rome. She must have been a daytripper with a Eurailpass. I told her she should have gotten off at Centrale, the previous stop, but it was a five-minute walk up Corso Garibaldi. It wasn't clear she was going to make it, but she headed off in roughly the right direction.
We retraced our steps on the way back. The shops were closed, the empty places where the market stalls had been were cleaning up. We walked up Via Duomo to Spaccanapoli (something caught my eye as I passed an alimentari, and I went in to discover our beloved cartons of fresh spremuta di arance rosse; N insisted on buying two) and to Scaturchio. We felt we had earned some of their excellent gelato. There were only six flavours, and a cup cost L.3000. I had caffe/nocciola, the former being best, really intense; N and A had fragola/limone, also excellent. We didn't try to talk Z out of limone/cioccolato, which she relished.
Back to the apartment. The cleaner and her daughter were still there, still in front of their respective TVs. Ignoring them, N and I put kids under the shower in the Jacuzzi to get some of the grime and sunscreen off them. Our unwelcome cohabitants left while that was going on, allowing us to rest, and get some music practice done. I opened one of the bottles of Falanghina the owner had graciously offered me, and sipped it while making travel notes.
Dinner was at Taverna dell'Arte, listed in one of our books, but on a street we couldn't spot on the map; we only discovered it that afternoon when we went one street too far down Via Mezzocannone on our way back from Scaturchio. Our book told us to reserve in advance, as the place was small, but we got there just as they were opening, and easily secured a table. This was probably the nicest meal we had in Napoli. The atmosphere was most pleasant, the proprietor (who seemed Spanish to me, but I wasn't sure) was friendly and welcoming, as was the male server who gave us a shy smile. We were offered black olive bread with tapenade as an amuse-gueule; N and I had zuppa di fagioli to start (with croutons of fried bread); while A had pasta con trappanare (a coarse-cut pesto) and Z had sausage and potatoes. For our second courses, I had aricia, medallions of roast pork in a delicate, slightly sweet sauce, and N had stoccafisso con patate. Then we all were offered a basil sorbet as a palate cleanser, sweet and intense (and very nice), followed by biscotti dipped in sweet Sicilian wine, and a dessert of almond milk thickened with gelatin and covered with orange-flavoured cream. The meal was not at all expensive, and one of the best of our trip.
As we walked up to the great wooden door of the apartment building, a station wagon pulled up and the owner of the apartment, Gianmaria, stepped out. A dark-haired woman waited in the passenger seat. He said he was just parking the car in the courtyard, and asked me how things were going. I said they were all right but the cleaner was there watching TV a bit too much. He laughed. That was the last time we saw him. "Bizarre," observed N.