Advice for Visiting Pompei(i)

Posted by beth on October 31, 2009

I give up. Is it Pompei or Pompeii? Because in English, it has two i’s, but in Italian, it only has one, so from now on, so as not to offend anyone either foreign or domestic, I’m just going to spell it with the second i in parentheses.

Ok, so I spent all afternoon yesterday in Pompei(i), and that mug is ginormous. It is ginormous, and I loved it…for about an hour. Maybe an hour and a half. Then it all started looking like old, empty rooms made of rock, and it just started to get depressing. And there would have been countless fantastic photo opportunities had I been there with somebody fun, but alas, I was all by my lonesome. 

So a few words to the wise – to anyone who wishes to visit Pompei(i):

1. Go early because that joker is HUGE for realz. I don’t know why it did not occur to me that IT WAS AN ENTIRE CITY, but it didn’t. And then I got there and realized that it’s like the size of lower Manhattan, which is relatively small, but you’re walking everywhere, which makes it bigger than it seems (that makes sense in my head).
2. Do not, and I repeat DO NOT wear heels. Wear shoes in which you can comfortably navigate miles and miles of extremely uneven terrain. I didn’t wear heels (have we met?). I wore pink sneakers. I’m just saying for any Europeans who are now reading. No heels. And really, you don’t want to wear flip-flops either. It’s really dusty (Did I mention it’s 2000 years old?), and your feet will be eight shades of nasty if they are exposed. Wear tennis shoes. You’ll thank me.
3. Eat immediately before entering, or take food with you. There is one place that will feed you, but I can only imagine the prices.
4. (Warning: This is a direct result of having watched too many detective shows lately.) Take a buddy, not only because it’ll be more fun, and you’ll have someone to take pictures with fighting gladiator-style in the amphitheater, but because a lot of the places that are open to visitors are rather secluded, and there are about a billion places to kill someone and stash the body so that it might never be found. They’ll just find it years and years later and think, “Oops, we must have missed this one on the first go-round. Hmm, she is well-preserved, though, isn’t she?”
5. Go in with a plan. Do your homework ahead of time, and know what you’re after as soon as you get there. If you just wander aimlessly, you’re not likely to see very much, and you’ll probably get bored. And if you don’t do your reading ahead of time, you won’t know that they have the world’s oldest basilica, or that the sidewalks were once paved with marble, or that there is a penis carved into the stones that pave the street to point out where a brothel once stood.

   See? I didn’t know these things, and I walked right past that brothel like three times and totally missed it. So even if your plan is just to take pictures of all the tourists wearing animal prints, that’s better than nothing. But to do that, you have to know how to get to where most of the tourists will be, which brings us to…

6. Invest in a map and a book with pictures so you know what you’re looking at and how to get to what you want to look at next. If you don’t have a map,  you WILL get lost, you WILL run out of water, and you WILL die of starvation in the maze.

   I am becoming increasingly fond of the tourist book. Not the actual guidebook, but the souvenir one. I think they have better pictures, and they’re not usually very precisely translated, which just makes them that much better in my opinion. The one I bought yesterday has particularly amusing pictures where they’ve taken a photo of the ruins and then added in cartoon “hypothetical reconstructions” not only of the rest of the building but of the activities that may have taken place there.

I never could really get a clear shot of this one, but I’d just like to point out a couple of things if I may. First of all, not that he needs pointing out, but check out the enormous gray man on the left. Seriously, is he already covered in ash from the volcano or what? And do note how ALL the men of ancient Pompei(i) appear to have been in extremely good shape. I think the gods were just jealous and wanted to wipe them all out. Flabby gods.

Apparently the soil is rich in minerals due to the volcanic…stuff, and with the temperate weather and all, it makes for ideal growing conditions for lots of plants. Clearly, I am an expert.

Here’s the forum, and I think that’s Vesuvius in the background, although the whole place is surrounded by mountains, so it’s tough to say for sure.

Pompei(i) at sunset.

And the picture you’ve all been waiting for…IT’S THE SHIRT!! It was a tad too chilly at this point to be sans hoodie, but I unzipped it so all my beloved coworkers could be seen (except poor Dan, who is on the back). When I asked the lady who took this picture to take it, I told her I had to prove to all the people on the shirt that I was really there wearing it, and she was AMAZED that I’d come all by myself. She thought I was very brave. Oh, and the gal who sold me the book/map asked if they were my family. I told her “close enough.”