Italy Day 2: Pompeii and Mt. Vesuvius

Are you ready for picture overload? 

Good. Lets begin!

Apparently we went picture happy this day. We have almost twice the amount of photos than from any other day. What can I say, Pompeii is pretty interesting.

This is what Hunter looks like if you wake him up before nine. And this was taken after about a mile of walking. haha. 

We met our group for this tour at the Piazza de Popolo (square of the people). Here are a couple of the cool things surrounding it (there are more at the end of the post).

About a 3 hour bus ride away from Rome is Pompeii! It is right outside of Naples, which is right along the coast. Interesting fact: before Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD Pompeii was the major port city in southern Italy.

These are some catacombs underneath the city. To help emphasize how dramatically the landscape was changed when Vesuvius erupted, the level that those were on used to be ground level. We were a good 20 feet higher at least. 

Tiny doors for tiny people. 

It really is incredible how well Pompeii was preserved.

This was a fast food joint. Using terracotta bowls allowed them to keep the food warm. Interesting, eh?

The streets of Pompeii. The sidewalk is elevated because the streets used to flow with waste. Thank goodness for modern day plumbing. 

Inside one of the nicer houses in the city...

...with original wall paintings preserved and all.

Obviously not the original gardens, but an idea of what it would have looked like. 

The level that Pompeii was built on was not the original level. When excavating, another level was found underneath Pompeii. That is what is pictured below, with the Pompeii level having the colorful walls.

This is a crosswalk - elevated so that you can avoid the muck on the streets. 

This picture doesn't capture it really well, but the level the trees are growing on is the modern day level. They had to dig pretty deep to find Pompeii. 

Original painting/carvings on the room of one of the community baths. 

And the lockers. 

This is a cast of one of the original bodies they found. You can see the terror the people experienced when Vesuvius erupted by the positions they assumed and the facial expressions.

The floor of the men's side of the bath. The openings on the side is where the warmth would come from and heat up all the water. Pretty incredible setup.

The main city square...with Vesuvius in the background.

The view from the outskirts of town.

And the crater at the top of Mt. Vesuvius. It is about a mile hike (after a 45 minute drive on tiny, twisty, Italian roads that give you a whole new appreciation for our big, lush American ones - especially when you are traveling by bus) to the top with a 14% incline. 

Another interesting fact: before the eruption that buried Pompeii, Mt. Vesuvius was 10 times as wide and twice as tall. Crazy, huh? I guess it would have to have been pretty huge to extend the coast line about a mile farther out and bury more than one whole city. 

Being at the top of the mountain also afforded a nice view of the Bay of Naples.

And just a few different angles on the crater itself...

After running in my minimalist shoes for so long I didn't realize how hard it is to walk in normal shoes. I cannot even begin to tell you how many times I tripped or stumbled over rocks. And I was wearing Pumas! They aren't even big at all! Apparently my sense of foot size has drastically changed. I can't imagine how bad it would have been if I was wearing normal tennis shoes. 

Don't worry, the Frisbee made it to the top of Vesuvius as well. 

And finally, our return to the Piazza de Popolo. The view from the outside:

The twin churches with the obelisk in the middle. This picture purposefully hides the church on the left because it was under renovation which ruins the ancient feel of things. This way you can kinda get the sense of it. 

And an up close shot of the church not under renovation.

Italy Day 1: The Vatican and The Pantheon

Today is day 3 of being home. Life has been a little crazy here (more on that later) so it has taken me a while to get around to posting. However, only being slightly adjusted back to my time zone is working in the blog's favor this morning - my day can't really start for another hour so I'll spend these wee hours of the morning playing a little catch up.

I can't even begin to describe how incredible everything was last week. We. Loved. Every. Minute. Hopefully sharing some of the pictures we took will help give a sense of just how amazing it was. 

I finally told Hunter where we were going as we were getting ready to land in Detroit. We had a short connection time and had to pick something up in the airport before we could board so I wanted to make sure we had plenty of time. Needless to say, he was pretty stoked. I was too and I knew where we had been going all along! It felt so good to finally talk to Hunter about everything I had been planning and all that we were going to do. 

We had some slight hiccups in finding the place we were staying - our driver from the airport didn't have a working phone apparently, didn't speak hardly any English, and what we were expecting to be a bed and breakfast ended up being just a bed (which still worked out perfectly well). After getting into the apartment and settled we headed out to explore. First stop: gelato. This would be the first of many.

Our first tour was of the Vatican that afternoon. We had a little time to kill so we took the scenic route walking there. Here is a good view of St. Peter's Basilica and the Tiber River. 

According to our map, this building is so heavy that it is borderline to falling in on itself. Our map of Rome was excellent and gave us all sorts of fun and helpful information. There are random buildings like this everywhere you go in Rome. What happened to wanting to build awesome buildings like this? Our modern buildings just aren't anywhere near as awe inspiring. 

Welcome to St. Peter's Square!

Hunter wanted to document places his Frisbee has gone. He is even starting a whole facebook photo album and plans to add to it in the future. I'm still not sure how I feel about it, but here is one of the first photos you will find in that album. 

Pretty water fountain.

View of St. Peter's Basilica from inside the Vatican.

Pine Cone Square inside the Vatican. It has a real name I just can't remember it at the moment and our tour guide referred to it as pine cone square, which seemed fitting. While we were in this square learning all about what we were going to see once inside the Sistine Chapel (which you can't take pictures of - so you'll just have to take my work that it's incredible), a girl in one of the tours ahead of us passed out. She collapsed right to the hard ground with a resounding thump. Moral of the story: drink a lot of water. It's quite surprising how little we had to go to the bathroom when taking into consideration how much we drank. Needless to say, there was a fair amount of sweating involved. 

I just loved seeing so many buildings like this! This style of architecture really amazes me. 

Inside the Vatican Museums everything is covered in frescoes like this. Almost all the ceilings and walls - every square inch - have incredible paintings covering them. 

There are also a lot of sculptures everywhere you look.

I wasn't kidding when I said the walls and ceilings are covered.

Inside St. Peter's Basilica it is every bit as beautiful. I cannot even begin to fathom how places like this were constructed without our modern tools. It. Is. Incredible. 

Swiss guards stand throughout the Vatican. They are easily identifiable by their uniforms.....

Close up of the outside of St. Peter's.

Next stop: The Pantheon. 

Here is a good view of the ceiling from the inside. It is a huuuuge dome. 

No Roman building would be complete without the classic pillars. 

In some cases gigantic pillars. 

This was the view we had as we enjoyed the first of many heaping plates of pasta. It doesn't get much better than this. It is seriously almost unreal.

And here are the heaping plates of pasta. They looked too good to not take a picture of. Spaghetti with Pesto and Mushroom Risotto.

Day 1 complete.