Buongiorno, benvenuto nel mio blog sull'Italia- just kidding, I can't speak Italian.

I almost didn’t go to Pompeii. It was on my list of things to maybe check out as I worked my way down the country heading southward, but I wasn’t sure what exactly there was to see there. A lava field and a plaque? I had no idea it would end up being the most interesting thing I did in all of Italy.

Pompeii was a wealthy town built on the coast, expanding around 450 BC from what had been an even more ancient Greek city. It produced wine and oil and was an important point of entry for goods that would travel over land to Rome.

The people of Pompeii had no idea they were living at the base of a volcano, since Vesuvius had not erupted in their known history, and the Romans didn’t even have a word for volcano. This is rather ironic since Pompeii itself is built on the plain of an ancient lava flow from Vesuvius itself, but nobody knew that then. Ruh-roh.

A major earthquake damaged the town in 62 AD, which no one in Pompeii realized was the mountain growling “GET OUT” like the house in The Amityville Horror. Then in October of 79 AD there were four days of minor earthquakes, increasing in frequency each day, to which the locals said “Pffft, who cares, we got a great deal on this town!” and everyone in the audience went “uuuuuuh oooooh.”

Then on the fifth day at 1pm, Vesuvius blew the fuck up. A column of all hell breaking loose shot 21 miles straight up into the air from what had been the top of the mountain, sending ash and pumice raining down on Pompeii. This was when the smart people said “Nope!” and got the hell out of Dodge. It’s uncertain how many of Pompeii’s 20,000 residents got out while the getting was good, because we’re still finding the remains of the people who thought this would all blow over, nearly 2,000 years later.

That night, the pyroclastic flows began, which is something you never want to begin. I had always misunderstood or just assumed that the people of Pompeii were killed by lava, since that’s what comes out of volcanoes, right? And though lava is of course terrible, there’s a certain comfort in the thought of slow-moving lava. I could get out of the way of lava! But Pompeii was never touched by lava. They got something much worse.

A pyroclastic flow is a current of insanely hot gas, vaporized rock and ash that flows down the volcano’s slopes at up to 400 miles an hour. The gas is heated to around 1,800 degrees fahrenheit. That night, the plume rising above Mount Vesuvius collapsed, causing all of that hot gas and rock to flow straight down the mountainside and into Pompeii in an avalanche of instant death.

This has to be the closest thing to hell on Earth imaginable. Everything in the way of the pyroclastic flow is instantly incinerated. It doesn’t matter if you’re inside, outside, hiding under your bed, everything is over in a flash as the hot gas sweeps through town in a blink, knocking down buildings and setting everything possible on fire. People’s blood and organs were vaporized in an instant, and one body was found containing a brain that had been turned to glass by the intense heat. If you weren’t lucky enough to burst into flames, you suffocated on the hot, poisonous gases, some of which turned into cement inside your lungs.

If you’d somehow survived all that, it didn’t matter, because Pompeii was then covered by 20 feet of ash and hot mud from the volcano, burying the town.

The next morning the sun didn’t come up at all, the air was so filled with ash that the day was darker than the night. So much ash and mud had fallen from the sky that Pompeii wasn’t even on the coast any more, now it was located 2,300 feet inland. The eruptions continued until the evening of the second day, and then all was quiet.

Subsequent eruptions over the next few hundred years buried even the tops of the tallest buildings of Pompeii, until there was literally nothing left at all, and even the location of the town was forgotten.

The ruins of Pompeii were rediscovered in the 1500s when an aqueduct was being dug in the area. They began to be seriously excavated in the 1700s after the discovery of nearby Herculaneum, as the cultural finds at both sites raised Naples’ stature, motivating further efforts to see what goodies there were waiting underground. This continued in starts and stops through the 1800s and 1900s, until much of the city had been unearthed. Pompeii has been a tourist destination since the 1700s, becoming part of the Grand Tour, where wealthy European young men would celebrate their coming of age by dicking around at all the great sites of Renaissance and Classical Europe.

Walking around Pompeii now is completely fascinating. It’s like a city-sized time capsule, frozen in 79 AD by the eruption that ironically both destroyed it and preserved it, packing the city away for safekeeping and delivering it to future generations safely encased in mud. Compared to the other Roman ruins I had seen, this place was practically New in Box, shipped straight from eBay. You can walk down the streets of Pompeii now and it doesn’t take much imagination at all to picture ancient Romans still living here, maybe they just ducked out for a minute to see some people they didn’t agree with getting fed to a lion.

The streets of Pompeii have the grooves of chariot wheel ruts dug into the stone, which I found striking. It was like they were just here.

Clearly visible signs on the walls designated certain streets as pedestrian-only, with the symbol of two dudes carrying a big jar of pickles.

A corner cafe, the equivalent of Roman fast food, still had intact counters with openings where the large pots of food were held, and holes and grooves in the stone sidewalk out front where folding sunscreens were put up to shield customers from the hot Italian sun.

Some of the villas were strikingly intact, with tiled courtyards and statues in place.

You could go inside many of the buildings, which was eerie.

I was struck by the artwork still visible on the walls. This is just paint on a wall and it’s been here for nearly 2,000 years!

Some of the art was not ready for prime time. The villa of two wealthy businessman brothers had a front entryway adorned with a painting of a dude with an impractical amount of dong.

There was much talk on the audioguide I was listening to of this not really being lewd, that it was actually celebrating fertility and wealth and yadda yadda yadda. Look, the Romans were crass AF, we don’t need to pretend they weren’t. It’s okay.

It turns out that when Pompeii was unearthed, there was so much graphically sexual art on the walls that much of it had to be covered up, lest it blow the minds of the prudish Europeans of the 1700s and 1800s. When the King of Sicily visited with his wife and daughter in 1819, the whole experience was so awkward he had the boner art moved to a special vault in the museum in Naples that had restricted entry like the back room of a video store.

It was fascinating to see the little details of daily life in an ancient Roman town, like the stones that blocked off the streets that were for carriages from the pedestrian walkways and public squares, which looked like the road had an underbite.

The Forum in the center of town was beautiful to see.

And I was mesmerized by how from anywhere in town you could look up and see Vesuvius looming, constantly foreshadowing a dramatic end that they didn’t know was coming.

The most striking thing in Pompeii however, are the bodies. The victims of the eruption were buried in ash and hot mud, which hardened around the bodies before they decomposed. During their excavations, archaeologists found hollow spaces in the ash that were left by the decomposed bodies. Injecting plaster into these voids, they were able to create perfect castings of what the bodies inside had looked like. These are deeply haunting to see.

It’s easy to read too much into the positions of the bodies. Is this one writhing in agony? Is that one someone who gave up, resigned to their fate and just laid down for a nap they never woke up from? In reality, these people likely died in a split second as the hot gasses flashed through the town, their muscles contorting in a reflex action caused by the intense heat after their spirits were already gone. Over 1,100 bodies have been found to date, but no one really knows how many of the residents of Pompeii didn’t make it out.

The combination of the frozen-in-time quality of Pompeii, which made you feel like you were really there in 79 AD, and the poignancy of these plaster castings, really impacted me and made me want to understand this event from all sides.

Before I leave Italy I’m going to have to go up that volcano.

My first attempt to go up that volcano utterly failed. There was supposed to be a bus from the train station in Pompeii that took you to the National Park entrance gate up on the side of Vesuvius, where you can start your hike up to the rim. Except that bus never came, and the girls in the train station I asked about the bus explained that it wasn’t going to come because it was after 1pm on the fourth Tuesday in a non-waxing moon in the age of Aquarius. Absolutely everything they said conflicted 100% with everything I had previously read about the bus schedule and some things that were posted right there on the wall, but the important part is that the bus never came.

And so it was the Crazy Train to Sorrento for me. This was my nickname for the Circumvesuviana line, which you need to hop on to get around the Bay of Naples, stretching from the city of Naples on the north end to Sorrento in the south. This graffiti-covered subway-like train came with ample warnings that you were probably going to get mugged, so just try to be cheerful about the whole thing. Everything I read online just said get ready to run after whoever is going to steal your bags as they will be along shortly.

The Circumvesuviana train was never, not once, even remotely on time. On my way to Pompeii the train had got stuck for no apparent reason for an hour, which is probably one of 37 reasons I couldn’t catch that imaginary bus going up Vesuvius.

I had originally planned to spend this night in Naples, to see another of the great Italian cities. This was until I started looking for a place to stay in Naples and ran into the general consensus among everyone everywhere that holy shit, don’t stay in Naples. Between its reputations for filthiness and crime, and the dearth of things to see there, the city did not come with a glowing recommendation. I was kind of tired of bullshit at this point in the trip anyway, so I decided to take the train south instead, to spend the night in the cute coastal town of Sorrento.

Sorrento lived up to its reputation by not being a toilet.

Ah, this is nice. I made a good choice.

I was sitting at a table out in front of a cafe on a quaint street in Sorrento, waiting for my vegan-mozzarella neapolitan pizza to come out of the oven, when the couple sitting at the table across from me waved for my attention.

“Excuse me, are you from the States?” They had noticed my accent when I ordered my pizza.

“Uhm, yeah? But I’m living in Wales,” I added, semi-defensively.

It turned out they were from Wales. Small freaking world.

And that’s how I ended up spending a long evening chatting with Jo and Martin from Southern Wales, who had got engaged at this very cafe during a vacation to Italy years before. This was fun, as they were both very nice and Jo had no filter at all, completely going against my every stereotype of what people from the UK are like. Wales really is its own country.

“Sean, tell us about your love life. Do you have a girlfriend?”

I was surprised a British person would be so direct.

“OMG, I’m sorry!” she caught herself. “Do you like girls??”

Ha ha. Jo proceeded to try to set me up with her friend, who Martin assured me was completely crazy. A few hours later I had to run off to call into a work meeting, but not before I had learned probably too much about their sex life and which of their grown kids were doing too many drugs, really. Oh Wales, you never fail to impress.

The pizza was delicious.

In the morning I was off to catch a bus to the Amalfi Coast. I intended to complete the Path of the Gods hike from Bomerano to the picturesque coastal town of Positano, where I’d be staying that night. This hike was supposed to be otherworldly, but a pain in the ass to do since it was a straight line rather than a loop. So you had to catch a bus at one end or the other, or have someone waiting to pick you up, which wasn’t going to happen in the tiny town of Bomerano. I’d decided to catch a bus from Sorrento to Bomerano, then hike the trail to Positano, arriving by that evening.

The one disadvantage of this plan was that I’d be doing the entire hike with my pack that was full of everything I was traveling with. Which was pretty darn minimal as these things go, but if you can avoid hiking up and down mountains carrying your laptop and all of your clothes for a six month trip you probably want to do so.

So! Now the easy part, catch the bus in Positano. I waited at where Google Maps said the bus stop was. No bus ever came. Huh. I went into a tire shop and asked if this was where the bus stopped. Yes, the people inside insisted, I think just to get me out of the store. Outside, no bus came, as the time for departure came and went. I walked up the street and into a magazine shop, where the dude sold me a bus ticket and insisted that a bus was coming. It didn’t.

An hour later a different number bus went by, which I tried to flag down, but it didn’t stop. Goddammit. It was already hot. Then way up a cross street I saw the bus I was trying to catch, going in some completely random other direction. I sprinted four blocks to catch up to the bus and tried to flag it down. The bus driver looked at me like “What are you doing? This is Italy, buses don’t stop here!” and drove off to Bomerano without me. That was the only bus for the day.

Hrmm. OK, I guess I’ll just go to Positano and figure out the hike from there. I walked all the way across Sorrento to the bus station. The bus to Positano was full and wouldn’t let me on. I decided to get lunch while I waited for the next bus, but none of the restaurants were open because it was before 3:30pm on the vernal equinox in a year that didn’t end in a seven.

I managed to buy an apple from a street vendor who didn’t know his astrology and was off on the next bus.

The Amalfi Coast is famous as one of the most beautiful places in the world, a picturesque stretch of the Bay of Salerno along the Tyrrhenian Sea. The narrow, winding cliff roads are notoriously dangerous to drive on, so buses with huge windows take tourists semi-safely to the mecca of Amalfi, Positano.

The bus that takes millions of tourists through this scenic wonderland has immovable screens laminated to the windows that make photography impossible, Italy I don't imagine you could possibly be new to tourism, but it kind of seems like you are.

You’ve seen Positano if you’re alive and you have the internet, it’s a town of pretty multicolored buildings stacked up steep cliffs rising from an idyllic bay. Any Instagram model who has ever Instagram modeled has been required by law to take a selfie of themselves looking ravishing on the beach in Positano, the quaint houses dotting the cliff sides behind them. It might as well be called “Instagram Town, Italy”.

The bus dropped me off in Instagram Town, and I made my way down the narrow accordion switchback streets, walking down the middle of the road for a complete lack of other options.

Eventually I reached my hotel overlooking the bay.

This was by far my most expensive night of my entire trip, as the fact that I was the only person in the hotel did not inspire them to adjust their prices at all. At least I was getting my money’s worth in the form of a beautiful view of the bay and the beach below.

Okay! Time to figure out this hike!

I pared down to just water and snacks and was off up the street to find the trailhead for the Path of the Gods. This wasn’t too tough, aside from trying not to look down from the vertiginous roadside or get hit by a car and bonked off the cliff road and down into the sea.

Positano has a lot of stairs. And by a lot I mean more than the whole rest of the world put together. This will not be a minor detail of your Positano visit. You will stay in Positano exactly as long as it takes for you to reach the breaking point where you suddenly scream “OH GOD NO MORE STAIRS NO MORE STAAAAIRS” and they drive you off to Naples in a padded van.

There were stairs to get from the town up to the start of the Path of the Gods trail, which took you through several different little cliffside villages and through tiny alleyways between people’s houses and past a stand that was selling frozen lemonade. I’m pretty good at hiking and stairs but this was really pushing it. It was approximately 200 degrees and the sweat was pouring off of me in torrents that filled my shoes, as the staircases went up, and up, and hey you know what, we don’t like you, have some more stairs.

All in all there were 1,500 stairs leading from the street in Positano to the start of the trail. The START. And that’s not a funny exaggeration number, I counted. And it’s on a sign. The only people I saw were a group of young Italians coming down the steps who were saying things like “You know what guys, I’m really proud of us for making it all the way!” They were super-proud of themselves for making it DOWN the stairs. Oh you motherf- We Buongiorno-ed each other as we passed, and they looked at me with a mix of both friendliness and reverence for the soon to be dead.

Eventually I did reach the top, in theory alive, and began the actual hike. I was so sweaty that all of my clothes were stuck to me like paint, and my shoes squished with every step from the accumulated sweat and tears.

“Hey Sean, greetings from the future. I have to say, we’d all been waiting for the day you’d finally put these travel blogs together into a kick-ass travel book. But now that it’s here, I have to admit I’m kinda disappointed. It’s just a bunch of Top 10 lists like ‘Top 10 Signs That This Hike Was a Bad Idea. #1: You’re sweating so much your farts sound like diarrhea.’”

Anyway, the hike was fine. I hate to be anticlimactic, but like everything about Positano, the incredibleness of this hike had been somewhat exaggerated.

Italy’s kind of like that. Very dramatic. Positano is the most beautiful town in the world! The Path of the Gods is the world’s most incredible hike! OK, calm down guys. They’re both fine. And each is very expensive, one in money and the other in tears.

Was the hike worth all that hassle with the buses and that cruel number of stairs? Maybe I was spoiled after doing so much great hiking on this trip, but: Nope, not really. That’s okay! I was happy to find out for myself, but it wasn’t something I’d sign up to do again.

For a good chunk of the hike I was treated to the donk-tink-dunking of bells up above me. Is there a church falling down the mountain? I kept looking up, in case there was a church falling down the mountain. If there was, it was the shy kind of falling church.

Eventually, the owners of the mysterious bells made themselves seen. Goats. Hey goats!

I did the hike as an out and back, turning around at the Bomerano end of the trail and making my way back to Positano. On my way down the stairs I stopped at the frozen lemonade stand and replenished about 2% of the electrolytes I’d lost on the hike. Oh my God, super-cold lemonade! This was one of the most painful and yet wonderful brain freezes of my entire life.

The sun set beautifully as I was coming back into town at the end of my hike, which I admired while I prayed a motorcycle wouldn’t come screaming around the curve and end my life, because there was no sidewalk or road edge to speak of.

When I got back to the hotel, I realized my skin was hard and crunchy. It took me a moment to realize this was a crust of salt from the preposterous amount of sweat that had evaporated off my body during the hike. I was like a walking alkali salt flat.

After getting cleaned up I made my way into the middle of town to see what this Positano place was all about.

Down the many, many, many steps at the very bottom of Positano sits Spiaggia Grande, which is Italian for “Big Spaz.” No I’m kidding, it’s Italian for “The Big-Ass Beach,” which is funny since it’s really not all that Grande. Just a short strip of little black rocks portioned out into strips of private beach after private beach, with the only public beach I could find marked off as being for locals only. Well okay then Positano, I didn’t want to hurt my feet on your stupid little rocks anyway!

I walked along the sidewalk under the moon, the sea so close but completely roped off. This exclusivity nonsense doesn’t appeal to me at all and I can’t say it endeared me to Positano, but I still enjoyed walking around the pretty little town and watching people out enjoying their vacations, families enjoying some time away, young people in love.

During this overall trip I experienced a very interesting mental shift. Counting my time in Florida and California over the holidays after I got back to the US, I was away from home for six months. I worked most of this time, taking a day off here or there if I was up climbing a mountain far from cell signal, but otherwise I was sightseeing and adventuring every day, and working from the hotel every weeknight, the time difference lining up nicely for those to be the daytime hours back home. The downside of this was getting very little sleep and not having any time to write about my travel at all while it was happening, but the upside was amazing.

I observed that we spend our entire lives in one of two mindsets, two modes. We’re either in the workweek grind, or we’re on vacation. Everyone I observed as I traveled around was in one of these two mindsets. In the workweek grind, we’re in this repetitive loop, getting through our day and looking forward to the weekend or the next vacation. But even when we’re on vacation, we’re not really free. We’re in the middle of a fixed amount of time that we need to enjoy before we have to go back to work, so it’s really all still part of that larger cycle we never escape.

One thing that’s opened up for me psychically over the years is an ability to see people’s mindsets. As a kid I could feel other people’s emotions, and it took me a while to realize they weren’t my own. I was picking things up from the people around me. I didn’t like being physically close to people as a kid because then I’d be carrying their emotional “stuff” around on me afterwards, sometimes for days. This ability never went away, but as an adult I’ve also begun to see people’s thoughts and emotions visually hovering around them like a hazy cloud, and I can often pick up what they’re thinking about, what their preoccupations are. Not always, and I tune it out most of the time so as to not get overwhelmed, but it’s very interesting when it’s clear.

As I traveled on this trip I became more and more aware of these two modes people were in, and that I was somehow outside of this loop. I was working, sure, but I was also going wherever I wanted and doing whatever I wanted every day. And I wasn’t on vacation, I could continue like this for however long I wanted. This was a wonderful feeling but also made me feel like a bit of an alien transiting through another world, realizing all of these people are looping in these patterns while I drift through like some kind of spectral free agent.

I drifted through the steep streets of Positano, checking shit out and eventually washing up on the shores of a vegan-friendly restaurant way up the hill for some delicious vegan lasagna and deconstructed cheesecake.

The next morning, the bus along the beautiful Amalfi Coast taking me to Salerno looked like someone had cleaned my window with a ham sandwich. All of my photos came out hopelessly blurry. How can you be so bad at hosting tourists, Italy? I assume you’ve had some practice. And as they say, practice makes passable.

I had decided it was time for me to leave Italy. I’d been in the country for three weeks, which is like three months the way I travel, and I’d had a wonderful time. But 1) I could feel my response to the daily weird craziness of Italy start to shift from bemused wonder to annoyance and 2) Italy was getting weirder and more difficult every day and that’s not a train you want to ride all the way to the end of the line. I decided to take one more day to see the last few things on my wishlist and then beat cheeks north, all the way up the boot to spend my last night in Italy in Milan.

Going from Positano to Milan in one day is borderline illegal and flies in the face of everything Italy stands for, because it doesn’t leave room for every train that day to break and for a bus station employee to tell you the wrong bus to get onto and for you to stop for 17 hours to drink coffee. I’d decided to spend my last day climbing Mount Vesuvius and hiking through the Roman ruins at Herculaneum before heading north, but doing all of that in the same day is just spitting in Italy’s face and begging for it to drop a goat on you from outer space.

Let’s see how this goes.

I mapped out the day meticulously and resolved to show up early for every bus and train, so I’d have time to deal with every street cow and Vespa fender-bender along the way. All right.

“Show me what you got, Italy!”

And it did.

Up on far too little sleep, I made the bus from Positano to Salerno. Boom! Now I just need to catch the Crazy Train to Herculaneum. The train was of course late and stopped on the tracks for a long time for no apparent reason, but I’d build in time for this. I made it to Herculaneum just in time for the 10:20am bus up Vesuvius.

“First bus is 11:20,” the guy said, standing in front of a huge sign that said “Buses every 40 minutes from 9:00 to 17:00.” “Is because the tickets.”

To climb Mt Vesuvius you have to buy tickets. And you have to buy them online. That’s right, you can’t just show up and buy a ticket at the entrance, that would be too easy and Italy doesn’t do easy. Actually I mean Italy does easy extremely well when it comes to them, at the expense of anything ever being easy for you.

Phrases you will never hear in Italy:
-Wow, that went smoothly!
-Hey, great driving!
-Where all the pretty women at?

A couple from Germany ahead of me in line were completely flabbergasted by this.

“Online tickets? It’s a fucking volcano!”

“This country does not update anything online.”

They don’t. I was far, far past this stage of annoyed indignation myself, not that the Germans were wrong at all.

To add a fun spin to the online-only ticket thing, when I booked the bus + volcano tickets the guy just took a QR code and stuck it in a little fake frame and took a picture of it with my phone. I have no idea what was going on with this hackery but it did get me through the turnstiles.

While I was waiting I had a sandwich in a cafe by the train station and chatted with the overbearingly friendly cafe owner, who was out in the street drumming up business.

I was hoping to get back down to Herculaneum by noon, but now that was going to be pushed forward an hour. Oh well. Then the 11:20 bus actually left at noon. Dammit Italy, stop showing me what you got.

The bus drove us up Vesuvius until it ran out of road.

Then we hiked up a dirt incline to a turnstile that scanned the fake QR photo on my phone. Boop! You’re in! The hike up to the rim of the volcano passed through a souvenir shop before it continued its steep way up to the crater. An SUV occasionally passed, either bringing people down who had overestimated their fitness, or driving people up who knew for sure they weren’t fit enough for this.

As the path climbed up, the view expanded to include Pompeii and the other cities far below us.

Various spots along the way offered a glimpse down into the crater.

The view down into the crater itself wasn’t much to write home about, but it still felt amazing to be standing there.

I was fascinated by the little plants growing on the rim of the volcano. Don’t you know this isn’t a safe spot, little guy? Well, I guess on the timescale you’re working with it’s probably okay.

Wow. It was eerie to know I was standing on the spot that had exploded and rained doom down on Pompeii and all of the other towns below. It was so peaceful now.

At the top there was a refreshment stand and a bench to take in the view of the surrounding countryside.

I made my way down the volcano in time for our bus’s departure time, which didn’t matter because the bus left a half an hour late. By the time we hit town again it was 2:30pm. Dammit Italy. Stop showing me what you got.

Herculaneum is one of the other less-famous-than-Pompeii towns that was destroyed in the eruption of Vesuvius. The town was a coastal getaway for the Roman elite, even more wealthy than Pompeii and filled with grand homes.

Because it was to the west of the volcano and the winds were blowing south toward Pompeii that day, Herculaneum experienced the disaster differently than Pompeii did. Pompeii was pummeled by falling debris from the eruption, which destroyed the roofs and upper floors of buildings, leaving the preserved ruins as single-story affairs. Herculaneum only received a few inches of ash before the hot gas came looking for everyone, carbonizing the wooden roofs of buildings but leaving papyrus that was buried in the ash preserved and intact. Because of all of this, the town is even better-preserved than Pompeii, and feels even more like an ancient city that the inhabitants had just left minutes ago.

Most of the inhabitants of Herculaneum had split town when the volcano started barfing ash everywhere, but like in Pompei, many stayed behind to see what would happen. The pyroclastic flow from the volcano was going 100 miles an hour when it hit Herculaneum, but it was distributed widely enough that it flattened some buildings while leaving others intact, creating a random pattern of disaster like a tornado. Some buildings look totally fine, while in another area a carbonized skeleton was found 8 feet off the ground, caught up in the torrent of hot gases.

Pliny the Elder, the famous Roman author and philosopher, witnessed the eruption of Vesuvius from across the Bay of Naples, and promptly set sail to rescue his friends who were trapped by the eruption of the volcano. Dodging falling volcanic debris, his crew counseled retreat but Pliny yelled “Fortune favors the bold!” which was ancient Roman for “Fuggit, YOLO!” They sailed to Herculaneum, landed in nearby Stabiae and rescued Pliny’s friend Senator Pomponianus and his family. Hooray! Then, in possibly the worst timing ever, this was the exact moment the pyroclastic flow from the volcano hit Stabiae and Pliny’s friends left his chunky ass behind to suffocate on hot gases while they ran for their lives. The lesson here is that if your luck is that freaking bad, “YOLO!” probably shouldn’t be in your vocabulary.

There was hardly anyone in Herculaneum when I was there, which added to the eerie feeling of being in a ghost town where you might turn a corner and stumble upon ancient Romans painting a boner or toying with the life of a small animal.

The preservation of the villas was amazing. Again I was blown away by the art that was still intact on the walls. This is just paint on a wall! And it survived 2,000 years and a freaking volcano!

Some of the streets had been worn away to where you could see the lead pipes buried underneath. Wow, I did not know Rome had that kind of modern-looking plumbing.

Might want to rethink those lead pipes though, that might explain some of the wanton cruelty. You never know!

It was fascinating to see how the buildings had been constructed. While most of the famous Roman columns were made from solid stone or cylindrical drums of stone fitted together, the columns in these homes were made of brick, which was then coated in a kind of concrete to resemble solid marble.

The most striking thing in Herculaneum, however, is without a doubt the boathouses. Down by what had been the waterfront, Romans fleeing the volcano’s wrath had huddled in the boathouses. This turned out to not be a very good idea at all. Today, the open arches of these boathouses are absolutely packed with surprised-looking skeletons, almost 300 in total.

Wow, that is some chilling stuff.

Only part of Herculaneum has been excavated, and at one end of town the excavation ends and there is a dark tunnel leading into the unexcavated areas beneath the modern city above. I followed this tunnel down to an eerie sculpture within, then promptly got the F out of there because it was creepy as hell down there.

Thanks to Italy being Italy, I had less time in Herculaneum than I’d originally planned, but this ended up working out fine, since the ruins were not huge and less time in the blistering sun isn’t always a bad thing.

After a long walking detour in Ercolano to visit a vegan-friendly burger place that wasn’t open (why would it be open on a Saturday afternoon? That would be crazy, people might come and eat all the burgers!) I made it back to the train station in plenty of time for my train up to Naples.

I popped into the cafe with the aggressive owner to get a Gatorade for the train ride. He seemed nice enough, I should give him some more business.

“Ah my friend from Canada! Come, have a drink.”

I grabbed a Gatorade out of the cooler with sweaty hands.

“No, no! Have something better, have my favorite drink!’

“What’s in it?”

“Just try it and let me know if you like it!” he insisted, refusing to let me know what I’d be drinking. It was clear he wouldn’t take no for an answer and I wanted to get out of here, so I shrugged and the nice dude behind the counter began mixing up orange juice and tonic water. Then he reached for some kind of liquor.

“Wait, sorry, no I don’t drink alcohol.”

The guy shrugged and finished the drink without the booze. I took a sip. Yep this is gross. OK, thanks anyway.

I went to pay for the Gatorade and realized they were charging me an extra 5 euros for the gross drink sample. Waiiiit I was just trying it to be nice, what the hell?

“You misunderstand my friend!” the owner explained. “You buy drink and tell me if you like it!”

What are we, actual friends? What do I care if I like your favorite mystery drink or not? I argued with the owner for a minute while the nice guy behind the counter apologized and looked like he wanted to crumple inside himself and hide under the bar. I realized this was only going to get worse so I just paid for the drinks and left.

“Goodbye my friend!”

“You’re a dick, take it easy.”

To this day I find it bizarre and amusing that I was annoyed about this 5 euro drink thing for like three days after that. It was just five euros! I had more money than that stolen by malfunctioning vending machines on this trip. I guess I just took it personally that I tried to do something nice going back to the cafe and fell into an extremely low-level con instead. I never got robbed on this trip, so I guess this is the preferable alternative. Though it didn’t exactly dissuade my growing feeling that it was time to leave Italy.

Back in the train station, soooo I’ll just, wait, is this the right door? I went through the wrong turnstyle, got locked out, asked a train station employee who was no help at all, and ultimately had to slip through an alarmed handicapped door and jump on the train as it pulled up, but I made it and rambled my way back up to Naples.

Cool deal. Only I didn’t have a ticket to Milan yet. All day I’d been trying to buy a ticket on my phone but the Italian train company app kept erroring out at the end of the long process with a message saying my cell signal wasn’t strong enough. I had full bars so that was just bizarre, I figured the app servers were having some kind of problem and I’d just buy a ticket to Milan at the Naples station, if I couldn’t get it to go through on the phone.

The app never got better, so I hit the line for the automated ticket machines in Naples. Pick your route, pick your departure, enter your name and phone number and email address on a janky touchscreen you have to touch two inches diagonally away from the letters you’re trying to hit, aaaaaand, it errors out with a nonspecific message. Three different machines did the same thing while some confused woman from Africa tried to get me to buy a ticket for her in broken English and the time until my train left rapidly ticked down.

Shit. My train’s leaving in six minutes. I ran over to the customer service counter. You can’t get into customer service through the normal door, covid regulations. Ran around the building to the entrance on the other side. Waited in line while the people in front of me had casual conversations about the weather with the train employees. Finally my turn, I explain what’s going on, and the guy says “Oh yeah, all the trains to Milan are full until tomorrow,” as if this was something obvious that everybody knew.

Why wouldn’t the train app just say that? Why would it even list that ticket, or let me select it and check out? It’s not like they’d just sold out this minute and the app hadn’t had time to catch up. I’d been trying to buy a ticket all day.

All right Italy, I see what you’ve got.

No more trains to Milan. The only flight to Milan was leaving in five minutes and I was at the train station, not the airport. The only bus had left that morning. Shit. I’d gone way out of my way on this trip not to stay in Naples and now I’m stuck in Naples. I guess I have to get a hotel and try again tomorrow.

I walked outside and started looking at hotels on my phone as garbage blew by in the wind. Some insane street person walked insistently straight up to me and animatedly tried to sell me his socks.

Nope, fuck this. I’m going to get as far north as I can tonight. I don’t understand the entire history of the situation here but in my limited experience the north of Italy seems about 100 times more functional and manageable than the south. Italy only became a unified country in the late 1800s, and you could tell. The different regions really did feel like different countries that just happened to share a language.

I found a train to Florence that was leaving shortly. Boom, here we go. While I was waiting to board the Florence train, I found a train ticket on the app going from Florence to Milan later that night. Oh, okay. So I am going to Milan after all! Why wouldn’t the ticket machine show that as an option? Because Italy.

Sitting on the train, I thought about Italy’s covid control efforts. They’d really put the efforts I’d seen in the US to shame. Everyone was wearing masks and you had to have your temperature taken nearly everywhere you went. How were they doing so much of a better job than the US? Do you think Italians like to follow rules? Have you ever driven in Italy? It turns out the trick is actually enforcing the rules, instead of just saying “Wearing a mask is mandatory if you feel like it.”

The one place this kind of disconnects is when eating on the train. Frequent recordings on the train say “Customers, you are required to wear a mask covering your nose and mouth at all times. And don’t forget to try our delicious mozzarella balls!” What am I supposed to do, absorb them through my skin? So of course you’re allowed to take your mask off to eat on the train. Which makes perfect sense for eating, but doesn’t really make sense at all at the same time. It’s not like Covid takes a break while you’re eating. “C’mon covid, I’m EATING. Gosh.”

Listening to the train recordings, I was continaually amused by the fact that the Italian word for mask is mascherine, which I heard 100 times a day every day. You were so close, Italy, then you just kept adding letters! Turn a 1 syllable word into 4 just to make it sound more Italian? Done and done.

After changing trains and grabbing a delicious burger in Florence, I arrived in Milan at one in the morning. After the long train ride my legs were so stiff that I almost fell getting off the train. What the hell, have I got arthritis now? As I hobbled along, I gradually realized it was my achilles. In the midst of months of training for a marathon in Minneapolis a few years ago, I started having trouble walking and thought I’d torn my achilles tendon, but I finished training and ran the race the best I could, figuring I’d just have to have surgery to fix everything afterward. Torn is torn, right?

The day after the race I couldn’t stand up. An x-ray at the surgeon’s office revealed that my achilles wasn’t torn, but I had a large bone spur on each heel that was stabbing into the achilles on each ankle, like a thorn on a rose bush. The more I ran, the more it stabbed and the worse the tendon got. The only way to fix this was to completely detach the tendon, shave down the heel bone, and reattach the tendon. The recovery for this surgery takes several months, and you may never walk right again. That’s a high price to pay just to keep running marathons, so I skipped the procedure and my running career came to an end that day. I later found out my uncle had had the same problem and he’d had that gruesome surgery. I remembered him walking stiffly ever after that, even after everything had healed. I guess it’s genetic, I’ve always had those spurs and it just took getting into marathon running and putting on enough miles to aggravate it enough to find out.

I’d switched from running to mountain hiking, which went okay as long as I didn’t overdo it. Hobbling through the train station in Milan, I realized that climbing mountains in Wales, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Andorra, plus climbing Vesuvius and all the steps that Italy had to offer, all over the course of a few weeks, counted as overdoing it. Live and learn! That’s when this trip pivoted from “Sean OMG are you seriously going to tell us about climbing another mountain?” to “Sean, OMG are you seriously going to tell us about visiting another theme park?” Yep!

I made my way across the Milan in the dark to my hotel. The Russian night desk guy buzzed me in and thought it was weird that I checked in and back out five hours later, but he hadn’t just crammed three months of Italian travel into the last three weeks. It was time to go.

Thanks Italy, it’s been fun. Monaco, here I come.