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Travel Adventures: A visit to Pompeii and Mt Vesuvius, Italy

We arrived at the port of Naples, Italy on an overcast morning in May, 2011.  From our ship we could see the imposing figure of Mt. Vesuvius looming over Naples and its surrounding communities.  While Vesuvius is famous for its destruction of the roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in A.D 79, many people forget that it is still an active Volcano.  It’s most recent eruption occurred in March 1944 and it is expected to erupt again in the future.

Our goal for this trip was to visit the historic town of Pompeii as well as climb to the crater on top of the volcano.

When we arrived at the base of Mt Vesuvius, it began to rain rather heavily.  Our guide from the interpretation centre near the summit of the mountain lead us up the last kilometre to the crater in the pouring rain.  During the climb up, it began to thunder in the distance.  Walking on a rock composed of magnetite and hematite under those conditions can make one rather nervous (as our guide clearly was) but he urged us to hurry to the top.  The entire mountain was wrapped in a thick cloud, so any views of Naples below were totally obscured.  The surrounding clouds created a feeling of ancient mystery about the place.  I half expected to see a dragon step onto the path as we traipsed up the rocky path.  At the summit we were able to view the bottom of the crater far below us and see the steam rising from fissures within the side of the crater.

Following our visit to the volcano summit,  proceeded down the mountain and headed for the ruins of Pompeii.  Even though the rain never let up during our tour, our guide lead us through much of the excavated site that has done so much to help us learn about day to day life in a first century Roman town.  The wagon rutted streets looked as if we would encounter a resident walking out from one of the many ruined and partially restored villas and buildings in the town.

The restored villas that we visited were most fascinating and seemed like they would have been spacious, elegant and comfortable by modern standards.  The preserved frescoes on some of the walls were amazing, particularly in the colours that they revealed.

Pompeii is an amazing site that I have wanted to visit since I was a boy.  I wish I had had more than a few hours to explore it.  Perhaps on my next visit I shall, although I think that a visit to the ruins of Herculaneum will be on that trip too.

Posted on Thursday, October 27th, 2011 at 12:18 am. Filed under: Photography, Travel Photography Tags: HDR, Italy, Mediterranean, Mt Vesuvius, Naples, Pompeii, Travel photography RSS 2.0 feed.