We woke up early on Tuesday morning, excited to experience our first day in port. We watched the sun rise and the city of Naples come into view from our balcony. Eager to get some ground under our feet again, we went to the dining room for an early breakfast and then joined the crowds of passengers exiting the ship. It was an unpleasant experience walking from the boat through the crowd of persistent taxi drivers and tour operators keen to make some money that day, but we made it through and started our walk through the city streets. We experienced some culture shock here, namely due to the crazy drivers and the lack of pedestrian crossings! It is no small feat to get a family of five across a three-lane road at rush hour in Italy!! When our hearts had stopped racing we had a look around to get our bearings, then set off to see what we could see. Unfortunately, the entire time we explored Naples, I never felt truly at ease. It was partly the traffic, but also a sense of not being as safe as we were used to in Sweden. Pickpocketing was never far from my mind.
The streets were colourful and the shop windows were beautifully decorated, but we found the streets to be dirty and the garbage cans overflowed. We enjoyed watching Italians greet each other with air-kisses and had a laugh at the cars and all their dents and scratches.
We entered into this piazza and crossed over the cobblestones to have a view of the sea and our cruise ship, then made our way back to have some lunch aboard the ship and meet our tour guide for our afternoon trek to Pompeii.
We were ready to be dazzled by Pompeii....and it did not disappoint us. We could see Mount Vesuvius looming above the city of Naples, but were amazed to learn that it was just a fraction of it's original size. We followed a tour guide as she led us through some of the many streets in this ancient city. It was interesting to learn that the cobblestone streets we walked on were original, and that the large stones placed strategically every hundred feet or so across the streets were stepping stones for when it rained and the streets filled with water. We saw the homes of wealthy citizens and poor, restaurants and a spa. It was really hard to picture this city buried in a blanket of ash and to envision the damage that was done so long ago. We had a very graphic illustration of the eruption and it's devastation when we viewed this representation of a dog who had died.
Fortunately, there was some relief from this horror, in the form of another dog, alive and well and enjoying the sun in the former market of the city:
The kids were getting tired by the end of the tour. We decided that we weren't really "tour" people. Having a receiver slung around your neck and a hard earpiece stuck in your ear while you trailed around behind a group of other tourists was not our cup of tea. We had had a full day of adventure in Naples and gladly boarded the boat for dinner and bed, all set to sail to Civitavecchia during the night so we could enjoy a day in the Eternal City on Wednesday.
