Not just Pompeii | FindPenguins

Nyeste først

Start på rejsen
26. september 2025
Not just Pompeii Rejsende
Naples the ugly city
27. september, Italien ⋅ ☀️ 24 °C
Piles of rubbish in every corner, and strewn over all the squares, graffiti on every surface, decayed and abandoned buildings, even the entrances of the new metro stations are kicked in and crazed. When we first went to jerez it felt tattered at the edges, and with fallen down, abandoned, buildings. But since then they have worked hard to improve and modernise. Here it feels that it's been this way so long they now just don't care. Very sad.

This morning we walked along Spaccanapoli the street dividing the centre of the city, and visited two churches that sounded interesting. The first, Gesu Nuovo, is a very decorated Jesuit church with rich 16c frescoes everywhere . The second was completely opposite- a very plain austere church with some beautiful modern stained glass in different styles. The church was bombed in 1943 but was rebuilt in the original style. It has a famous cloister covered in colourful 17c majolica tiles - not to our taste but impressive. It has a small bit of original 14c fresco by Giotto or one of his pupils and an excavated Roman bathhouse very ruined.

The next stop was a museum with a fabulous painting by Caravaggio with many other boring paintings.

After lunch we went to the Duomo which contains the oldest baptistry in Europe with wonderful 5c mosaics - like the ones in Ravenna, a 13c church also with mosaics and a chapel with 13c frescoes.

A tiring day among hordes of noisy tourists but worth it.Læs mere
Se oversættelse
0 synes om
Not just Pompeii Rejsende
Museum day
28. september, Italien ⋅ ⛅ 23 °C
Today we spent in the Naples museum, which is a really good museum; well-lit, beautiful artifacts, labels in Italian and English. We were impressed!

We will be going again on our tour so we avoided the pompeii stuff, but there's lots of other things. One floor of Egyptian things which were very good, the Farnese collection of jewels, with lots of cameo work including a spectacular bowl made from red and white striped sardonyx with a white cameo. Then lots of mosaics, some from pompeii, which were the finest we have ever seen, made from tiny, tiny, tessera. We did look briefly at the Pompeii and Herculaneum frescoes to find the ones we have pictures of on our bathroom wall.

One the way back we stopped to see a small excavated section of wall from the pre-roman Greek city of neopolis.Læs mere
Se oversættelse
0 synes om
Not just Pompeii Rejsende
Arrival in Pompeii
29. september, Italien ⋅ 🌙 22 °C
This morning we spent in a huge museum and gallery on top of the hill overlooking Naples, with works by painters like Michaelangelo, Caravaggio, Raphael, and Artemisia Gentileschi. Even though half of it was closed for refurbishing, it still took us a few hours to get round. The museum has a great collection of first class paintings from 13c to 18c from wealthy families like the Farnese and the Bourbon rulers.

After that a local train from Naples to Pompeii, and meeting up with our tour after breakfast in the morning.Læs mere
Se oversættelse
0 synes om
Not just Pompeii Rejsende
What a day!
30. september, Italien ⋅ 🌙 21 °C
Today was all about Pompeii. We started off at 9.00 with an hour's lecture from our archaeologist Jamie Sewell who has excavated here and is very good. We entered the site at 10.00 and got back to the hotel at 5.30 with just 45 min break to eat our packed lunch. It was exhausting but worth every minute. Jamie finished his tour about 3.30 but we couldn't resist popping into a few more houses on our walk back. The mosaics in the Naples museum are better than those left in situ but the frescoes still here are much better as they are just as fine and you can see them in context. And there are so many of them - far more than we were able to see 26 years ago when we were last here. Can't describe them all but for our benefit will try to list the places we saw:

Amphitheatre
House of Julia Felix
House of Menander
Triangular forum
Great theatre
Insula of chaste lovers (still being excavated)
Forum
Forum baths
Villa of the Mysteries (home to frescoes on our bathroom wall)
House of the vetti
House of the faun
House of Marco Lucrezio Frontone
House of Sirico
Stabian baths
Thermopolium of Vertutius Placidus
House of the marine Venus.

We took over 70 photos and plan to go back to see more on Monday after the tour finishes.Læs mere
Se oversættelse
0 synes om
Not just Pompeii Rejsende
Back to the museum
1. oktober, Italien ⋅ 🌧 18 °C
We went back to the Naples museum, this time as part of the tour, but they wanted to take ages talking in the huge gallery of pompeii sculpture, which didn't interest us. So we broke off and did it our way. We started in the gallery of roman glass, which was spectacular, then all the frescoes from the temple of Isis, followed by another wander through the main fresco gallery. Then objects of daily life in pompeii, which were really interesting, although anything wooden didn't survive so it was mostly bronze or ironware. There is a gallery of "Magna Graecia" covering the original Greek settlement of the region from 800bc and it's continuing influence on the Romans. Finally we flew through the prehistory section, which is the latest gallery opened but didn't seem very well thought out and presented.

After lunch a tour of underground Naples to see the remains of the medieval city and roman city now several metres below current street level. With streets, roman roads, rows of shops and other buildings you can still walk around.Læs mere
Se oversættelse
0 synes om
Not just Pompeii Rejsende
Paestum
2. oktober, Italien ⋅ 🌙 13 °C
Today we drove for an hour and a half south of Pompeii to a Greek town of Paestum. It was first founded in 800bc as a trading settlement and later grew into a planned Greek polis based on an organised grid system of roads. It flourished until overrun by the Lucanians around 400bc and then the Romans a century and a half later. Both adopted Greek culture and preserved much of the Greek monuments.

The main features of the site are 3 magnificent Greek temples still standing to full height - some of the best preserved anywhere. But we were surprised to find that there are many other interesting ruins to see albeit not so well preserved. After Jamie's tour and explanations we spent another hour and a half wandering round on our own.

This area is famous for its buffalo mozzarella so we had to try some for lunch. After lunch we had a couple of hours in the site museum and rewarded ourselves with yummy gelatos.

Yesterday there were thunderstorms and rain which we managed to dodge. Today was sunny again but much cooler and very windy.Læs mere
Se oversættelse
0 synes om
Not just Pompeii Rejsende
Herculaneum, Oplontis and Boscoreale
3. oktober, Italien ⋅ 🌙 12 °C
Another busy day visiting 3 locations close to Pompeii and all buried by the volcanic eruption.

First was Herculaneum which was a town like Pompeii but different. Whereas Pompeii seems to have been a town on the make, Herculaneum seems to be more upper class and relaxed. It also suffered a different fate. Whereas Pompeii was buried under 40 metres of small light pebbles of pumice which suffocated anyone left behind, Herculaneum suffered a pyroclastic flow of superheated ash around 400c that killed anyone instantly. The ash then hardened to concrete but the buildings didn't collapse so the houses still have upper floors and preserved charred wood.

The excavated area is much smaller than Pompeii so we were able to visit most of the open buildings:

House of the wooden screen
Central baths, women's section
House of Neptune
Grocery store with mezzanine and wine racks
Workshop of the metal worker
Arches to forum
College of the Augustales
Central baths, men's section
Grand tavern
House of the telephon
Sacred area
Ancient beach with skeletons of fugitive
House of the stags
House of the artist
House of the black saloon
Samnite house
House of the bronze herm
House of the mosaic atrium and undulating floor
House of the tuscan colonnade
Boat museum
Antequarium/ museum.

Second was a very large seaside villa in Oplontis that is still being excavated. It has a very large swimming pool and many rooms with frescoes in the 2nd style.

Last stop was a small farmhouse where the main product was wine. It also had a lovely museum containing lots of information on daily life including burnt remains of food and drink that has been analysed and identified. It also has on display the bridal carriage recently excavated and restored as seen on a BBC programme.Læs mere
Se oversættelse
0 synes om
Not just Pompeii Rejsende
Stabia
4. oktober, Italien ⋅ ⛅ 17 °C
So today we drove south out of Pompeii to the next town along the coast, Stabia. This was famous for its very richly decorated high status shore-front villas, and as the place where Plini, admiral of the fleet , sailed to try and rescue people from the AD79 eruption, and him dying on the beach in the process.

We went to two spectacular villas: villa Arianna, (named for a fresco of Ariadne and Theseus) and villa San Marco, Each built right onto the cliff overlooking the bay, and consisting of dozens of rooms covered with fabulous frescoes. Afterwards to a really good museum (museo libero d'orsi) full of fine artifacts from the villas, and after a quick visit to the modern seafront, to another museum (Terzigno) way up on the lower slopes of the volcano to see things from 3 more modest villas around it that were discovered from digging a quarry. These villas were primary involved in producing wine and olive oil but also had some decorated rooms.Læs mere
Se oversættelse
0 synes om
Not just Pompeii Rejsende
Awful last day of tour
5. oktober, Italien ⋅ 🌧 20 °C
Today was supposed to be about sites mentioned by two writers - Pliny and Robert Harris. Pliny was admiral of the Roman fleet based at Misenum from where he described the stages of the eruption. Robert Harris started his book 'Pompeii ' in the Piscina Mirabilis, the cistern, big enough to provision to whole fleet with water, at the end of the aqueduct, also at Misenum and this was to be our first site. Misenum is in the Campo Flagrea to the northwest of Naples and the whole area is a caldera that sits on top of a giant magma chamber that is active and causes the ground to move up and down, through two or three metres. Yesterday there was an earthquake here, just 3.4 magnitude, but enough for them to close the archaeological sites especially those underground. So we drove around looking at anything Roman we could see and whilst we were in the open there was a violent thunderstorm with sheets of torrential rain for 20 mins. We were expecting rain today so were all wearing waterproofs and had brollies but they couldn't cope. We were all soaked so voted to give up and return to the hotel to dry out. Jamie is taking anyone who wants to go back into Pompeii site this afternoon but we prefer to wait for the sunshine tomorrow.Læs mere
Se oversættelse
0 synes om
Not just Pompeii Rejsende
Moving on
6. oktober, Italien ⋅ 🌙 17 °C
The tour ended last night with everybody going their separate ways this morning. We took the opportunity to go back into the Pompei site to see some of the bits we didn't see before, for another three hour visit. Then we took a taxi out of Pompei to go to Vico Equense, a town on the coast near to Sorrento, and opposite the island of Capri. We will stay here for a few days before going home. The hotel is right on the beach, has pools, and there are good restaurants so we can just chill .Læs mere
Se oversættelse
I hope you are both recovering from what looks and reads like a brilliant but very full-on tour. I loved all your photos especially of the non-Pompeii sites as I only went to Pompeii and that was quite a long time ago. Herculaneum looked especially interesting because of the different nature of the preservation. I'll be in touch in a week or so. Look after yourselves and thank you for this. It's wonderful looking through your photos! xx [Davina]
07.10.2025SvarOversætte
0 synes om
Not just Pompeii Rejsende
Rest day 1
7. oktober, Italien ⋅ ☀️ 21 °C
Big breakfast, sit in the sun by the pool, bit of a swim. Tough day! And not a thunderstorm in sight!
Se oversættelse
0 synes om
Not just Pompeii Rejsende
Rest day 2
8. oktober, Italien ⋅ ☀️ 21 °C
Pretty much the same as yesterday but with the addition of the beach. It's no Caribbean strand - quite small and a mix of sand and pebble - but it is pleasant enough. The sunbeds around the wellness pools are more comfy so we spend more time there.Læs mere
Se oversættelse
0 synes om
Not just Pompeii Rejsende
Rest day 3
9. oktober, Italien ⋅ 🌙 20 °C
Another day by the pool and on the beach, except today the wind dropped and the sea was calm enough to go for a swim.
Se oversættelse
0 synes om

Slut på rejsen
10. oktober 2025