Saturday, August 30th, 2025
This morning we walked to the train station in Sorrento to meet our guide, Gino. Our group rode the train with him to the Pompeii station. He gave us a tour of Pompeii. We had visited here before but we still saw things we hadn’t seen before.
Pompeii was a UNESCO World Heritage site. It was a Roman city that was destroyed and preserved by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD.
Pompeii was founded in 600 BC and was a busy Roman trading city and port with approximately 20,000 residents. After the eruption of Vesuvius that buried the city, it was rediscovered in 1599 during the construction of a canal. Excavations are still happening today.
The Stabian baths were public baths from about the 2nd century B.C.! It was divided into two sections, one for men and the other for women and it included a courtyard that was used as a gymnasium.
We visited the House of the Faun which was a large home with an area of 2,970 square meters or 3,552 square yards. The owner was a wealthy magistrate. The home had an atrium decorated with a mosaic floor and in the center was a bronze statue of a dancing satyr.
The home also had an enormous floor mosaic that depicted the Battle of Issus between Alexander the Great and the Persian King Darius.
In the Palestra dei Iuvenes was a frescoed wall. It was a private gymnasium for young men.
Our guide showed us the highlights but we barely touched the surface of how big the Roman city of Pompeii was.
After our tour we visited the Antiquarium which housed many artifacts discovered during excavations.
Modern archaeologists detected hollow spaces in the volcanic debris. This space was created by victims’ bodies decomposition. They slowly filled in the spaces with plaster. They created molds. Below are a couple of the molds that were housed in the museum.
When we finished our time in Pompeii we took the train back to Sorrento. We stopped by a wine bar near our hotel to enjoy some wine.
We enjoyed an Italian red wine that our server suggested. It was delicious.
This evening we walked around Sorrento.
There was a travel agency nearby and because the weather tomorrow was supposed to be great we booked an Amalfi coast boat tour.
It was the Romanico Palace Hotel. Our room was quite unique.
