Anniversary Trip to Italy

On our last full day in Italy, we got up in Amalfi and headed north to Rome to return our car, but on the way we decided to stop in Pompeii. It was so unexpectedly cool. The city was originally built by the ancient Greeks, then taken over by the Romans, so some of the buildings we stood in were actually 2,500 years old and possibly older and the preservation of the city frozen in time by a volcano eruption was really unbelievable. Jason kept saying how everyone should have to visit Pompeii in their lives because it’s just an experience that you could never teach. If we thought in Rome old was “old”, in Pompeii it left your mouth wide open. We never expected it to be so large or so well preserved. It was a full city and we visited a bank, a bakery, a brothel, a bar, someone’s home, the town centers, a Christian Basilica, Egyptian temple, a Roman temple… it was a cosmopolitan port city that catered to everyone and had everything. There were pipes that brought running water into people’s shops and homes and beautiful mosaics on the floors of the homes. The casts of real people frozen in motion and emotion as the lava swallowed them was chilling. It’s only 75% excavated so far and we only took in a fraction of that, but we left totally impressed and satisfied.

We turned in our car in Rome and sat in a bar overlooking the Coliseum and had some beer and paninis before boarding our sleeper train back to Venice, where we woke up and had some coffee and pastries and said goodbye to Italy as our water taxi took us to the airport. I

t was a long 10 hour flight home, but if you can travel on long, intercontinental flights in first class, do it because those seats that lay flat were more comfortable than the sleeper train beds.


I don’t know if you can tell, but we loved Italy and we are already planning our next trip back. But our next big stop is Turkey, so tune in for that trip report next…..

For more pictures, visit flikr (there are two pages of pictures, so make sure to check all pages)...