Italy Day 8 – On the Way to Pompeii for the Last 45 Years

We have a very early train to Naples, Our innkeepers not only arrange for a car for us, but have an amazing breakfast delivered to our room at 5:30am.  It’s so nice to be taken care of.  High speed train clocks in at 186 smooth civilized miles per hour.  Our driver, a tall athletic woman with a flirty voice and bright blue eyes under Gold trimmed Ray Bans (not that I noticed or anything…) meets us at the station.  It’s 500 meters from the train station to the highway but takes 15 minutes.  On the highway south, it smooth sailing all the way to Pompeii, our first stop.

I was in grade school when my parents and grandfather took a month-long trip to Italy.  When they came back my father told me stories about the ancient city buried by a volcano, inhabitants and all.  He gave me brochures and photos taken with his expensive Fuji 110 that he purchased during the trip.  Oh, and this happened on August 24^th, the same day I was born.  This sounded like the most exotic thing ever and something I swore to see for myself one day, if I was lucky enough.  Today I am that lucky.  We pull up, greeted by a long line of tacky souvenir shops and pizza stands.  The shops are unchanged since my parents visited in the early 70s, with what looks to be the same weathered people selling the same weathered chachkies .  I decide we’re in for the whole throwback experience, signing up for a guided group tour instead of the self-guided audio tour, something we rarely do.  It’s hard to live up to 45 years of anticipation, but Pompeii is everything I hoped it would be, complete with preserved frescos and casts of people in their final pose.  Our guide, a young, petite Italian woman with a salmon colored umbrella, does a good job of showing us the major components and the small details that fascinate her.  For example, during its prime, there are 40 bakeries in the city.  There are also 120 brothels.  Priorities, priorities, priorities.  We tour one of the brothels, the wall paintings still intact so that sailors from foreign lands could order off the picture menu.

Two hours and 10,000 pictures later, we exit Pompeii and our driver magically finds us in the street out front and loads us back into the Mercedes van.  Off the highway, the roads into Sorrento are even narrower, even steeper, even crazier that any we have seen in Italy.  Now we understand why Rick Steve recommended ditching the car before we got here.  Some things are best left to the professionals.  During the last few miles, our driver calls our Airbnb host and makes arrangements, gesturing wildly with her arms while on the call.  Luigi meets us and checks us into our flat, a spacious, high ceiling corner studio with three balconies at Marina Piccolo done in bright pastel colors we associate with old Florida.  The Marina docks dozens of large personal craft, none less than 30’, and is the hub for tourist travel with no fewer than six ferry lines run from these docks.  We have lunch in busy main square, watch the comings and goings and get adjusted to the pace of this classic beach town. 

The main walking street in Sorrento is Corso Italia, a wide pedestrian thoroughfare with shops and restaurants.  Corso Italia functions as the boardwalk does in a New Jersey shore town.  Paralleling the Corso on either side are the incredibly narrow alleys found in every town built into the hillsides in Italy lined with shops, hotels and restaurants ranging from the cheap to the exclusive.  We have fun getting lost in the maze and emerge at the edge of Sorrento, a bluff high above the sea with a stunning panoramic view.  Light dinner on the “boardwalk” at an Enoteca (wine shop with tastings) that served a few very nice local dishes.  We watch as tourists and locals alike take their passeggiata, the traditional Italian stroll to end an evening.