Naples

Naples was another day where we didn't stay in the city where we disembarked. This was our largest tour so far with 16 people in total heading out to Pompeii and to drive the Amalfi coast. Our guide was Fabrizio who was great as usual. Our first stop in the morning was to Pompeii and we actually arrived before the site was open. In the meantime we got to see a demonstration of the art of cameo carving which was impressive.

Once inside Pompeii we had about 2 hours to go through the ruins, but we could have easily spent two days. Fabrizio described how the city wasn't buried by lava, but by the dust and ash that Vesuvius spewed into the air when it blew off the top. Once in the atmosphere, the cloud blew in the direction of the city and covered it completely. We saw quite a variety of buildings from the city including the theater, the forum, bakeries, houses, storefronts and even a whorehouse. One of the more recent techniques introduced to the excavation is the injection of plaster into the spaces where organic material was originally buried. A few of the casts that have turned up include that of animals and people. A picture of one of those casts is up on Picasa. The rest we'll share when we get back. After the tour of Pompeii we got to sample Limoncello, a local specialty liquor made from the gigantic lemons that grow in the fertile soil of the region.

The drive up the Sorrento and Amalfi coasts split the tour into three camps. The entire road while it was outside of towns was very narrow and perilously close to the edge. The first group were the people too afraid to even look out the window or open their eyes. The second were those with the cameras that must have taken at least a thousand pictures between them trying for perfect shots of the coastline between people and battling against the glare of the windows (I was one of those). The last were the people that had to compete for "window time" with the second group or get trampled as they worked elbows and cameras in the way.

The towns were gorgeous and the clear waters were remarkable. The pictures that I managed to capture don't do the scenery justice. We stopped in Sorrento for lunch and for the first time ever got to have gnocchi that was as good as Totero's, thanks to Melissa sharing (I had actually ordered canneloni since it was the first time I'd seen it in Italy). The stop in Amalfi was unfortunately brief since we had run late at our earlier stops and the roadway back was expected to be very busy with traffic returning home after the long holiday weekend. The last memorable thing from the stop in Amalfi was Katie and I getting our feet in the water just as everyone else was boarding the bus and running back without our shoes on to be the last ones on.

Katie managed to snag quite a few good pictures of the sunset as we were leaving. After dinner with more of our cruisecritic.com friends we called it a night looking forward to finally being able to sleep in on tomorrow's at sea day.