Italy 2011 - Day 2

Started the morning by being on a weird schedule so checked email at 4am but then was able to go back to sleep. So the one thing about italy is most places include breakfast so we had breakfast, fresh squeezed orange juice, frittata with fresh roles and cheese. Yummy breakfast. After breakfast we walked over to Pompeii which was across the street from our hotel. So for me I was thinking Pompeii, frozen people frozen life, just a small area. Boy was I wrong... this is a huge town with tones of streets. The streets are made up of large stones kinda like cobble but gigantic lava stones. The stones have ruts for where the carriages went. There were large stepping stones to cross each street, guess the streets were like sewage so people didn't walk in them. Then you have in the close background Mt Vesuvius, and I thought people living on the california fault were insane pompeii has a new giant city still right at the base of this not so dormant volcano. Crazy I tell you. Any way back to the buildings, so apparently the town was covered in ash but due to the pyroclapic (sp?) cloud. Many roofs were destroyed and everyone was killed about 10,000 people. We saw some casts of people as they died. This is pretty wild.. to preserve them the determine a body is buried under the ground and they dump plaster thru a small whole. This captures the cavity where the body decomposed and the bones are just kinda hanging there. The molding of the body shows noses, faces all kinds of stuff. Pretty amazing.. they have taken the technology one step further and use fiberglass now (although they didn't have any examples) so you actually see the bones in the moldings. Pretty wild. Anyone some other interesting stuff is they had these counters with basins that served as fast food, they had a sauna room that had hot water in the walls to really finish the effect. The theater was huge and pretty amazing.
The auditorium is suppose to be the oldest of its kinda and that was cool where the gladiators versus animals occurred. This is a G rated blog so I wont go into the fancy art work. Lets just say they really like the goddess of love, Venus. Hmm lets see was there anything else interesting... trees over here are kinda odd they trim em up to the top so they are kind canopy like.

So after pompeii we headed to Sorrento on the coast opposite Napoli on the bay. Anyway if you have ever driven thru Malibu or any of those town on Highway 1 you know what the Sorrento coast highway is like. It was insanely busy bumper to bumper the whole way. Our hotel however is up on the bluff, wonderful view at night cant wait to see it in the morning. We ate dinner overlooking the bay Joe had fish and me Cannelloni. Gotta try all these italian dishes. For desert had tiermasu (sp?)... don't like coffee so although good i wont get it again.

Tomorrow the bus down to Sorrento then the hydrofoil off to Capri Island.