2010 Italy – Pompei
19th October 2010
In May we emptied the contents of our flat in East Sussex so we could rent it out. We bought an old transit van and took our remaining belongings to Croatia. During the summer we enquired about selling the van in Croatia but there was lots of red tape and no one wanted a right-hand drive in a country that drives on the right. It wasn’t an expensive van but still worth taking back to England to sell rather than scrapping it in Croatia. The solution was to drive it back to England and turn it into a holiday on the way.
We arrived at Dubrovnik port in plenty of time for the 11 pm ferry to Bari but had to wait ages for all the lorries to board first. The boat only had one entrance so the huge lorries had to reverse in. The crossing was quite rough and whilst I was used to it having worked on ships, Federika was quite worried and refused to believe that the movement of the boat was normal. We arrived in Bari at 8 a.m. and on our first coffee stop I was reminded of the strange habit Italians have of eating or drinking whilst standing up. We sat at one of the tables which were all empty while all the standing places were full.
We stopped in Pompeii to view what I thought would be just a few ruined houses but turned out to be a large town, a lot of which was still being uncovered. We walked around for ages but still only saw a small area of it. There was no drainage at that time but high pavements so when it rained they were happy to let the roads become rivers and being built on a hill the water just drained away. 
Federika had read that there was an exhibit of a couple having sex when they were covered in lava so they were effectively turned to stone. I had my doubts as I don’t care how carried away you get, you can’t tell me you wouldn’t notice molten lava coming through the windows. The truth turned out to be that someone used the hollow area left after a couple was covered by lava and poured plaster into it, using the cavity as a mould to produce a statue. The couple probably weren’t having sex but more likely embracing, in the knowledge that they were about to be ashified. Having said that, judging by the number of pornographic murals on the wall and the tales of sex and debauchery that was going on at the time, it was reasonable to assume that at least half of the inhabitants of Pompeii were having sex at the time of the eruption.
2010 Italy
