Today is mainly a travel day as we take a bus from Sorrento to the east cost of Italy and pick up the Adriatic Ferry to Athens. However, we do get one stop over for a couple hours in the city of Pompeii. We just finished touring through the amazing city of Pompeii and since we have some down time while we are commuting across Italy, I figured I would type this up.
In case you don't know the story behind Pompeii, I'll give you the two second summary. Pompeii is an ancient city, about a 45 minute drive outside of Rome, that experienced a catastrophe of epic proportions when Mt. Vesuvius erupted and covered the city with 20 to 75 feet of ash. Because of this eruption many people died horrifically suffocating as the ash covered everything around them.
The ash from this eruption amazingly preserved the city and many of its inhabitants. Our group took a guided tour of the city and it was interesting to see how intact so much of it actually remained. Obviously, they have done a lot of restoration as well, but the main structure of the city still stands. Upon finding this site originally, historians were able to learn a plethora of information about how these people lived. It's a truly remarkable place with amazing architecture (for that period). Additionally, it was one of the first cities to use pipes for water transfer between houses, fountains, and bars. Granted, these pipes were made out of lead, so lead poisoning was most likely a very frequent cause of death. But using pipes in this fashion shows that Pompeii was many years ahead of it's time.
That's all I have for now. We pick up the ferry at 7:00 P.M. and get to Athens around 12:30 P.M. tomorrow. So it's going to be a long ride, but I think a lot of us are looking forward to just taking some time to relax a little while we take the overnight ferry. So on to Athens!
