We made sammiches, put on our rain ponchos, and boarded the train for Pompeii. Pretty much everyone else aboard the Circumvesuviana rail line was also going to Pompeii, though we didn't learn why until we got there.
Turns out we were very lucky in our choice of week to visit Italy. It was Culture Week, when admission to all the big museums and cultural sites is free! Of course, that meant lots of Italians taking advantage of the discount to visit their own heritage.
It was drizzly when we got to Pompeii, and the rain only got heavier while we stayed. Consequently we did get a very practical demonstration of Roman skill at creating drainage systems. I'm pleased to report that Pompeii's pavement and gutters worked just fine even though the warranty expired about 1,933 years ago.
One very interesting discovery I made at the site: we call Pompeii a "Roman" city, but that's not entirely true. It was subject to Rome and eventually assimilated into the broader Imperial culture, but Pompeii is actually older than Rome! The traditional date of Rome's founding is 753 B.C. (and so far archaeologists haven't disproved that), while Pompeii was apparently settled around 1000 B.C.
There's a tendency to think of the Roman Empire as something like a modern nation-state, but it wasn't. Especially in the early years it was more of a confederation of city-states (just not a voluntary one). If you went back to A.D. 79 and spoke to someone in Pompeii, he wouldn't say he was a Roman -- he was a Pompeiian. Even if he enjoyed Roman citizenship that was more of a legal construct than a national identity. (Just as you can go to Pompeii today and the people there will say they are Italian, German, or whatever rather than European, even though their passports all have the EU circle on them and their wallets have Euros in them.)
Of course, in A.D. 79 our hypothetical Pompeiian would probably be too busy saying things like "Aiee! There's flaming ash falling on me!" to discuss the subtleties of citizenship vs. national identity.
We spent a lot of time in the baths because it was one of the few structures with a roof. I noticed a very unhappy-looking dog curled up in a corner of the caldarium, evidently trying to find a dry spot where nobody would trip over him.
Most of what you see at Pompeii is walls. All the artworks and the famous plaster casts of dead people are in museums. With time and imagination one can reconstruct the city around you and get a sense of what life was like two millennia ago. Unfortunately that's hard to do when your shoes and socks are soaked and there are troops of Italian schoolchildren, middle-aged Japanese tourists, and elderly Brits and Germans all trying to walk in the dry patches with huge umbrellas.
We did stop at the ancient amphitheater, which has been restored because absolutely no one could resist the idea of staging concerts and plays in Pompeii. The acoustics were still sound: Diane went down to the stage and sang a few bars of Gilbert & Sullivan, which were clearly audible to us in the cheap seats at the top. It got her some odd looks, but how many other biomechanists can say they've performed in Pompeii?
When our pants legs were soaked to the knees we gave up and took the train back to Sorrento, where hot showers and dry clothes restored morale.
That evening the rain finally stopped. We ate leftover pizza, I took the kids out for gelato, then let them watch The A-Team in Italian while Diane and I went out together for a brief date. We strolled over to the Excelsior Hotel to sit in the bar overlooking the bay. There was a cruise ship taking aboard its launches down below as we sipped little chilled glasses of Limoncello, the local liqueur. Across the bay we could see the lights of Naples.
We walked slowly back to the apartment holding hands.
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