This morning we docked in Napoli (Naples) alongside the Royal Caribbean Line Rhapsody of the Sea, a huge ship that seemed to dwarf our ship, and another MSC ship. A busy port for the day. We met our guide, Francesca, and headed out in our coach towards Sorrento and the Amalfi coast drive. Once out of the 1.2 million population metropolitan area, we traveled along the coast to some of the most stunning scenery ever.
The Amalfi Coast is like driving US 101 along the California coast, but closer to the edge and more populated and more traffic. Eventually we arrived at the Village of Positano, a vertical community replete with stairways up and down the cliffs and donkey carts to haul goods up and down. Never had we seen an area like this - cars parked for miles along the highway, as parking in the village was limited, scooters and motorcycles likewise along the highway cliffs. Buses are limited to 12 meter length, as any thing longer could not make the hairpin turns required.
After photo stops and a turn around, we headed back up the coast and stopped in the town of Sorrento for a marvellous lunch at the Ristorante da Gigino for some genuine Italian meals, gnocchi with shrimp and white sauce, gnocchi with red sauce, caprese salad with fresh ripe tomatoes and mozzarella, lasagne, and some of the best Margherita pizza ever tasted. A truly stunning meal. We then shopped for 1/2 hour, lost one of our troupers, who was later tracked down, and then headed to our final stop of the day.
Pompeii is almost indescribable. We had two hours, and our guide rightfully said that she could spend a week with us there and still not cover it all. Beginning in 63 AD, with an earthquake, the village was just beginning to rebuild when, in 79 AD, Mt.Vesuvius erupted covering the entire 20,000 population city in ash and asphyxiating gas. The City remained buried until the mid 1800’s when archeologists began to uncover the area.
Restoration has continued to this day. We saw marketplaces, temples, homes monuments and everyday shops for fish, meat, poultry and bread. Roads for chariots and horse carts, storage places and homes. We viewed plaster casts of people that were killed, in various stages of agony or just sleeping in their beds when disaster struck. We all vowed that we would return for another tour and more time in the future. We will see.
We returned to our ship at 6:00 after a long but educational day of touring. As this was our last night on the ship, we held an impromptu cocktail party in three adjoining cabins, using up all our remaining wine and champagne, and nibbling on the breadsticks we liberated from our luncheon. We completed our evening with the final performance of the piano quintet, giving the young women a standing ovation for their final performance, as they too were ending their stay, although in their case since December 20, 2017. We are headed tomorrow for Rome and a last few days before returning west to see what has happened in the world since our departure.
