7 October - A1 Motorway, Italy

We are enroute to Rome airport. We left Praiano at 7:15 this morning. The man at the Maresca Hotel got up early this morning to make sure we had some breakfast and then we were off to the Pompeii excavation site. Pompeii of course was Roman town totally destroyed by the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. Everyone perished almost immediately and the whole town was covered in 6 to 10 meters of volcanic ash. There it lay, totally buried for 1,500 years, to be discovered some time in the 1700's. Over the past couple of hundred of years the site has been progressively excavated and a whole city with houses, shops and public buildings has started to emerge.

This photo shows one of the excavated streets with Mt Vesuvius in the background.

The unfortunate inhabitants of Pompeii were caught so unaware that many of them died where they stood, sat or lay totally embedded in the volcanic ash. The bodies of course decayed over the years but left cavities in the ash. Archaeologists have filled some of these cavities with plaster to recreate the shape of the bodies. One of the most moving aspects of Pompeii is that we are able to view the plaster casts of these poor victims at the moment of their death.

We are now about 50km out of Rome, having a bit of a break before we drive to Rome airport to return our car and get ready for the flight home.