Essential Pompeii

Few moments in the ancient world are as vividly documented as the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Pliny the Younger watched it unfold from across the bay and wrote two letters describing what he saw with the precision of an historian. We know that his uncle, Pliny the Elder, sailed towards the disaster rather than away from it, driven by a combination of scientific curiosity and human compassion that cost him his life. And we know, with a specificity that no other lost city can match, what Pompeii looked like on the day it was destroyed, what was cooking on the stove, what slogans were daubed on the walls, what the inhabitants wore, worshipped, traded and feared. It is this intimacy, a sense of a world interrupted rather than simply destroyed, that makes the sites of the Bay of Naples so extraordinary. Greek colonists, native Samnites, the Romans (of course), Bourbon excavators and World War bombers have all left their marks on these sites. This tour sets out to explore that world in depth and in context, providing expert guidance with a well-thought-out itinerary which includes free afternoons for independent exploration and a hotel in the modern town of Pompei for easy access to sites.