A day in Pompeii had me gasping from the minute we arrived. (Gasping in awe at the sheer scale of the ruined city, but also gasping for breath- it was so hot that Vesuvius might as well have been erupting throughout our entire visit.) Summer in Italy is hot hot hot, and that August day the temperature sizzled to over 40ºC. And this region really does seem to have a recurring problem with all things hot and smoky, I’ll tell you that for free.
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My first visit to Naples had been in winter. I loved the city, but more than anything I couldn’t wait to come back and spend a day in Pompeii, which is just a short train ride away. A few years later, in sky high temperatures, I returned to Naples and finally got to see the ancient city, seeing some intriguing parallels between the ancient and the modern. All I’m saying is, whether man-made or completely natural, this southern part of Italy can’t seem to shake the smokey problems at its very core.
The Land of Fires
Naples is chaos, but I love it. The cacophony of people shouting, dogs barking, and caged birds singing from balconies above. Mopeds buzzing down actual staircases, cars honking at each other furiously, children playing football on every open piazza, and the faint background buzz of the occasional old television set, wafting out of open windows shrouded with net curtains, behind which grandparents sit in the afternoons. Even when the sky is overcast, the heat that emanates from the city is intense. The grand old, slightly dishevelled buildings, are weather-stained and streaked with graffiti. Across the dazzling Bay of Naples, beautiful old Vesuvius sits; a Devil in Disguise whose green slopes are an emerald jewel in the landscape, but who also swallowed an entire city whole in one day.
Then, of course, there’s the trash.
I first visited in winter, when the city’s trash hadn’t been cooking in the sun for days, so to arrive again in summer and immediately have lungs filled with the cloying stench of stale alcohol and soggy bin juice, was quite a shock to the system. But Naples is Naples, and the trash is part of it. Where Rome has the Colosseum, pizza and the Pope, Napoli has Maradona, pizza and, well, the trash. In fact the trash is so much a part of it, that between 1994 and 2008 the entire region of Campania was declared in an official state of emergency.
There was no real waste management system in place, and the Camorra (the Campanian answer to the Sicilian Mafia) took control, taking the trash away at a cheap-as-chips rate, then dumping it in the surrounding countryside, and burning it in great big toxic bonfires. Businesses paid taxes to the Camorra, which went towards bribes for the local government, and the smoke from the toxic fires blew in great billowing clouds across the region.
Turns out, waste management is an extremely lucrative industry, which generates billions of euros a year for the so-called ‘ecomafia’ of the Camorra. And, surprise surprise, toxic smoke isn’t actually very good for the environment.
What happened next? Well, the rate of cancer and other diseases rose significantly, and the ages of people developing these diseases lowered. This is one of the poorest regions in Italy, and one which relies heavily on agriculture, but a lot of the soil and water was contaminated. And although it’s no longer in an official ‘state of emergency,’ the problem isn’t fixed. There are fewer fires, but they do still happen, and some questionable waste incinerators were also constructed to try and curb the problem. A quick fix, maybe, but not a long-term solution- and the incinerators also had very few regulations or safety checks to adhere to.
The area suffering most heavily from exposure to toxic waste fumes became known as the ‘terra dei fuochi,’ or ‘land of fires,’ and the fires continue to smolder.
From Naples to Pompeii in the Land of No AC
Given the hustle and bustle of Naples’ busy streets and the rising aromas of the trash piles on every corner, I was glad to be at the train station and escaping the chaos, on the hottest day I’d experienced in a long time.
The line for the windows at the ticket office was more of mob than a queue, and after a pit-stop at a kiosk where we were handed two sfogliatelli and a sandwich stuffed with prosciutto and wrapped in a napkin, we ran down the steep staircase to the platform and sat waiting for the train. It squealed in about twenty minutes later, and we were extremely lucky to get a seat on what turned out to be a very full journey from Naples to Pompeii. You could recognise the people travelling further than Pompeii, along the Amalfi coast to Sorrento, because they were dressed for the glamour of the occasion. A middle-aged English couple sat opposite us, the wife in a very lovely citrus-print skirt and matching headscarf, and the husband in a smart-casual outfit accessorised with loafers and a straw trilby. They were living their Italian dream, I could tell.
I was also living my Italian dream, except I was covered in the remnants of my sfogliatelle and had the first faint traces of sunburn, from the very short time I’d spent in the open air that morning. It was a far less glamorous look, I’ll admit.
The twenty minute journey from Naples to Pompeii Scavi, wasn’t what I’d expected at all. The train roughly followed the curve of the bay, out of the city and towards the ever-present volcano, but the concentration of densely-packed buildings never really dwindled. Apartment blocks were stacked like concrete bricks all along the route, sprayed with more graffiti and accentuated with lines of laundry and old TV aerials or satellite dishes. For a few brief moments, every now and then, we would glimpse a twinkle of blue sea, an antidote to the suffocating heat of the train and Naples and Campania.
How to get from Naples to Pompeii: The Full Guide
A day in Pompeii
Perhaps the soaring temperature had deterred the hordes from visiting Pompeii that day. We followed the signs away from the station, up the little road lined with souvenir stalls and restaurants selling pizzas and pasta from laminated photo menus, heading straight to the entrance. There was no queue, so although we’d bought a skip-the-line ticket, there was no actual line to skip. It was brilliant.
We sailed straight on in, and were greeted with one of the most incredibly preserved ruined cities I’ve ever visited. In stark contrast to the crazy blur of Naples, here was just the sound of cicadas chirruping. And whilst some of Pompeii’s streets may be narrow, the city planning seemed far more ordered than the rabbit-warren of Napoli. It was also much, much bigger than I’d expected. We wandered up and down the curved cobblestone streets and in and out of buildings, and I couldn’t really get over the thought that so many people had lived and worked and partied and ate and drank and gone through their entire lives there. And now there we were, modern tourists traipsing all around the ancient.
Nowadays, Campania is one of Italy’s poorest regions, along with Puglia and Calabria, but back in ancient times Pompeii and its surroundings was a playground for the wealthy.
The variety of buildings in Pompeii is mind blowing. The theatre complex contains the Great Theatre- which seats about 5000- as well as the Amphitheatre, and the Odeon. (Which isn’t a cinema, but a smaller theatre.) The Palaestra is the gym, where young Pompeiians trained and hopefully didn’t skip leg day. The Forum was the heart of the city, where speeches were given, meetings were had, and decisions were made, and the marketplace is also here. There are several baths, temples, and a Christian basilica to be found around the city, and all kinds of houses, from teeny-weeny to luxurious villas, containing elaborate paintings and fountains. (Honestly, the paintings are absolute stunners.)
Then there are the things you might not have thought about; an ancient snack stand was recently unearthed, decorated with brightly coloured frescos and containing traces of 2000 year old leftovers within the counter. The more ordinary things like bakeries (with loaves of bread still in the oven), tanneries, wine shops, sculptors shops and barracks. And not forgetting, the brothels, of which there were many. Pompeii had a notoriously open attitude to sex, and prostitution was very much legal here; there’s also some hilarious Latin graffiti scrawled across buildings, ranging from the vulgar to the downright hilarious. It just goes to show, graffiti is no modern phenomena. There’s something innately human about scrawling ‘Aufidious was here’ into a wall, isn’t there?
A Ruined Roman Metropolis in Croatia
How was Pompeii destroyed?
On to the notorious cone of Mount Vesuvius, sitting ever-present like an ancient mafia boss lying quietly in wait, keeping a watchful eye over its territory. I say ‘lying in wait,’ pals, because this bad boy is still very much active. The toxic smoke that blows across the countryside these days is an entirely man-made poison, but the power of Vesuvius and its plumes of volcanic ash and smoke, is an even more destructive force.
The eruption which destroyed Pompeii and the nearby town of Herculaneum, happened in AD 79, and although it was preceded by several earthquakes, these weren’t out of the ordinary for the region. Earthquakes are just the kind of thing that go down around these parts, so the people living around the volcano had no real reason to run. When Vesuvius began to spew its mushroom cloud of fiery volcanic ash, rocks and smoke into the air, the people of Pompeii could maybe have got away- had the wind been blowing in a different direction. (The nearby town of Herculaneum had more survivors thanks to this.) But the wind blew the cloud of volcanic oblivion directly over Pompeii; rocks rained down from the sky, and its residents were suffocated almost immediately by the fiery ash, or killed by rocks flying across the city and destroying buildings.
Pompeii was quickly buried under several metres of ash, freezing that one moment in time and preserving the city almost perfectly until it was rediscovered in 1748.
Could Vesuvius erupt again?
The question of whether Vesuvius will erupt again is less of a ‘could it’ and more of a ‘when will it,’ and it has erupted several times since that fateful day in Pompeii. The last eruption was during tin 1944, when it caused several fatalities, and before that there was a bigger eruption in 1631. This is considered to be one of the world’s most dangerous active volcanoes, not just because of its destructive power and unpredictability, but also because of the sheer amount of people who live around it.
I’ll tell you now: it is an awful lot of people.
The ‘Red Zone’ is the area considered to be directly in the line of fire from an eruption, and there are currently more than 700,000 people living in this area, including some of those living in the densely packed city of Naples. Although there’s an evacuation plan for the city and the other residents of the Red Zone- who will be evacuated to other parts of Italy in case of an eruption- there’s no way of knowing whether it would be effective in practice- until it happens.
The Burning Fields
The craziest thing of all, is that while Vesuvius is one powerful beast, it’s actually just a teeny tiny part of a much larger area of volcanic activity.
The Campi Flegrei- ‘burning fields’ or Phlegrean Fields- is an active supervolcano about 13km wide, just west of Naples. This is an ancient caldera- that is, a volcanic crater- which is partially underwater in the Bay of Naples, and partly on land, directly beneath the homes of about half a million people. Unlike Vesuvius, which is pretty obviously in existence with its monumental crater, a lot of Campi Flegrei is bubbling away deep underground. There are several spots in the area where the fiery activity that lies beneath has surfaced, like the Solfatara crater, where sulphurous gases waft angrily from the ground.
And the land of the Campi Flegrei is notorious for ‘bradyseism,’ where the earth’s surface expands and contracts due to magma and gases bubbling below. In the 1970s and 80s, the coastal town of Pozzuoli rose by about 3.5 metres, and the land continues to rise at a rate of about 2cm per month. The nearby ancient Roman city of Baiae sank into the sea hundreds of years ago, during a sinking phase. It’s similar to the way that the Greek island of Santorini was changed after a volcanic eruption sank a lot of it into the sea- leaving just the rim of the crater above water.
The official line is that there’s no danger of Campi Flegrei erupting any time soon, although a series of larger earthquakes over the last few years have been unsettling to say the least.
Can man ever beat nature?
People have lived here amongst these volcanic fissures, fields and mountains for thousands of years- and the earth has boiled and cracked and spat lava and smoke for the duration. The land continues to smoke, and it seems as if it’s only a matter of time until an eruption happens again; whether that’s in decades or centuries time. Above ground, the polluting of Campania continues, as more toxic waste burns.
If the Ancient Romans were still around, they’d be forgiven for thinking that Terra Mater is preparing for her next retaliation.
This part of Italy is captivating, full of life and character, and- it seems to me- a little bit cursed. If there’s one thing that I understood during my day in Pompeii, it’s that life is very fleeting, and no matter how much of an intricate life we create for ourselves, nature is capable of changing everything in an instant.