Pompeii and Pisa

It's retrospective post time again. Back in 1990, a Eurail Youth pass was an incredibly inexpensive and effective means of travel. Overnight trains, including sleeper trains, were common, and trains linked major cities with surprisingly high frequency. As a result, you could reach almost any European location with a railway station with ease and schedule your travel to maximise the ground you covered without compromise.

Dean Keiller and I used a 15-day flexi pass to explore Europe in the Summer of 1990. You could use these days whenever you wished on almost any train within three months. The pass also included conditions that offered incredible flexibility. For example, you could board a train in the evening to another city, and only the following day would count as a ticketed travel day. I don’t recall the details, but I imagine this flexibility was limited to trains departing after a certain time.

Likewise, you could get off a train at an intermediary stop and spend time sightseeing before continuing to your destination. The only caveat was that you had to arrive before midnight to avoid using a second day on your Eurail pass.

I made good use of this flexibility several times. For example, we got off the train between Stockholm and Copenhagen to explore Gothenburg, and again between Copenhagen and Munich, where we spent several hours exploring Hamburg. However, my scheduling skills came to the fore while traversing the length of Italy.

First, on 19 September, we squeezed in a half-day exploring the buried city of Pompeii while travelling to Brindisi to catch an overnight to Corfu. Then, upon returning to Brindisi, on 25 September, we stopped for several hours in Pisa while en route to Zurich. I timed our stopovers to perfection. Dean and I later agreed that we’d had ample time for everything we’d wanted to see in each location.

Pompeii was fascinating. As we all know, the city was buried under metres of volcanic ash and pumice during the eruption of nearby Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Its deadly covering preserved the city for the next two millennia until a major excavation in the 1950s. Pompeii was a wealthy town containing up to 20,000 residents at the time it was destroyed. As a result, its ruins offer a unique snapshot of Roman life at the very moment it was buried.

To get ourselves oriented, Dean and I walked Via dell'Abbondanza, the main street in Pompeii, marvelling at its truncated marble pillars and abandoned buildings. A visitor’s map helped us locate many of the paved thoroughfares’ popular attractions, including preserved mosaic tile floors and walls decorated by frescoes in some of the wealthiest homes.  The streetscape above was sourced from the web.

The final image of Dean above was taken in the Basilica, a covered complex that acted as the local law court, and possibly a mercantile trading exchange. It sits on the edge of the city's expansive Roman Forum piazza. According to archaeologists, the Basilica was a hive of activity with large numbers of people bustling about their daily business. Evidence of this is visible in the hundreds of examples of graffiti, including some particularly vulgar expressions, scratched onto its walls. 

Without a doubt, a highlight for both of us was the remains of residents who'd been buried by the ash. I’d heard so much about these uniquely preserved bodies. Curiously, these crude statue-like figures aren’t actual bodies. They’re plaster reproductions created by filling cavities left in the hardened ash long after the original corpse has decayed. 

I was surprised by how few victims were on display, only three or four at best. Likewise, their condition was equally disappointing. We stumbled across them without any fanfare, stored in a rather dusty building housing all manner of artefacts, including rows of clay amphorae. In the decades since, if online images are accurate, the archaeological park has dramatically improved the quality of these exhibits.

The Amphitheatre of Pompeii was also particularly memorable. It is one of the oldest surviving Roman amphitheatres in the ancient world. It once seated 20,000 spectators. Unlike many earlier stadiums, it was built entirely of stone, rather than timber. The amphitheatre was first partially excavated in 1748. It was later completely excavated between 1813 and 1816. 

However, even today, much of its tiered seating remains partially overgrown by soil, shrubs and grass. As a result, you feel like you’re an explorer stumbling across an ancient ruin for the first time. Interestingly, much of the vegetation we saw has been excavated in more recent years.  I count myself lucky enough to have seen it in a more atmospheric state. The first image shown above was taken by me, the second was pulled from the Internet.

Our return journey via Pisa proved equally memorable. Like all good tourists, we disembarked at the main train station and made our way across the Arno River to Piazza del Duomo.  The walk along Via Rome takes about half an hour. For the most part, it’s a fairly unremarkable walk until you reach the Duomo.  I still recall how excited we were upon entering the piazza and seeing the Leaning Tower of Pisa for the first time. Its collonaded white marble facade looks exactly as it does in all those iconic photographs.

We were equally stunned by the carefully manicured lawn surrounding the piazza's three main buildings. Elsewhere in Europe, the entrance to a church was typically marked by a paved plaza. However, on this occasion, the vivid green expanse that greeted us was the perfect foil for these dazzling white buildings.

However, we didn't climb the famous bell tower. It had been closed to the public nine months earlier as a major engineering project designed to stabilise the structure and prevent its collapse got underway. According to Wikipedia, more than a decade was spent carefully removing 38 cubic metres of soil from underneath its higher end. The tower's tilt was ultimately reduced by 45 centimetres. The tower eventually reopened to the public in December 2001 and was declared stable for another 300 years.

Naturally, we took an obligatory image of us diligently propping up the bell tower.  That's the image of me which opens this post. Dean and I also took time to explore the neighbouring cathedral and the baptistry. The piazza was largely crowd-free thanks to some rather damp and overcast weather. While it was great to experience Pisa without the crowds, we never did see the famous white marble facades glistening in the sunlight. I'd finally see them on a sunny day, almost two decades later.

One final observation. It took some careful planning to get to Pisa. We initially caught a long-distance train from Brindisi to Bologna, then transferred onto a regional train to Florence, before transferring a final time onto a local train bound for Pisa. Once our sightseeing was done, we retraced our steps to Bologna and rejoined the long-distance train to Zurich. Remember that all of this was planned while we were on the road in an era before the Internet or personal computing devices. Instead, we used nothing more than a printed DL-sized timetable book, a folded map, a notebook and a pen.

With Pisa ticked off our bucket list, it was back onto the train for a journey back through the Alps to Zurich. Follow this link to learn more about our time in Switzerland.