2011 Pompeii, Italy
Jamie wanted to go to Pompeii and asking around, found that Paul had already been, a few years earlier, with his wife. Wanting to spend many hours there he thought it best to take someone equally obsessed with Roman culture and architecture as himself! And so Earlyworks visited Pompeii. Here there were Roman buildings above knee height, a novelty in frontier Britannia! The pair stayed in the modern town of Pompeii and visited the ruins 3 days in a row, entering the site at 8:30 each morning and staying till around 5:00. The heat was intense, a heat-wave was gripping Italy in August 2011 and there were two forest fires raging on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius while they were there. The visit included three visits to Pompeii (and included off peak hours which gave them sole access to the amphitheatre and Lupercalia, sites usually chock a block with tourists from 9:00 onwards ....), as well as a visit to the summit of Vesuvius, a trip to Herculaneum and also to the island of Capri, where emperor Tiberius held court away from Rome. |
Get there early enough and you have the amphitheatre to yourself, an extremely rare treat indeed. Soak up the atmosphere, imagine the horror, the despair and the excitement.