Leisurely strolling through Pompeii and what you can see without a plan

Strolling through Pompeii

A visit to Naples wouldn’t be complete without seeing Pompeii. Pompeii, for all those who don’t know, got buried under mounds of ash in 79 AD after an eruption of Mount Vesuvius. You can even watch a film about it. Not a good one but you get the point.

Even if you are not into history, this should be on your must visit list. So when you go there, don’t be like us! Come prepared! Get tickets online! Also get your train tickets before! I really believe our biggest mistake for Pompeii was that we thought it would be fun to just stroll through. It is fun, but you don’t get much out of it. Here it really pays off to take some time beforehand and look into it online. Get a map and look for all buildings that you want to visit. Then find out at what time they will be open. There are three different opening schedules.

Also the Pompeii area is huge. And the buildings are all over the place. You can walk around for ages. Maybe you will also get lost if you can read maps as well as I do. There is also not a lot of shade. And you are in the south of Italy. So the result is that you are hot and tired after a couple of hours. Still interested in going? Then take some time and make a plan before!

So here is what you see when being totally unprepared. We bought our tickets right outside the train station so to not line up at the actual entrance (it was well worth the two extra Euro). I was already tired of lining up. We had waited 25 minutes for the train tickets! We then tried to use the official Pompeii map and walk around. After an hour we gave up of finding our way with the map but rather started looking up information about the buildings we were standing in front. Didn’t work out great! But we managed to get an overview and a good impression of the whole area. Still, I am definitely planning on going again! This time prepared though. Yours, Pollybert