Pompei, old and new

Coming out of the train station in Pompei, I was holding the map upside down, so we headed one block in the wrong direction before we stopped to ask for help. The B&B Certe Notti was further from the train station that I had originally believed. Not a terribly long walk, but a little taxing with our luggage after such a long day. Most people seem to estimate walking lengths as “20 meters” or “450 meters” when things are really more like ¼ mile or 1.5 miles. I don’t know exactly what “20 meters” or “450 meters” converts to in miles, but I know it’s not nearly as long as what we are walking. We arrived at the door step at about 4:30 PM, an hour and a half later than we had planned to arrive due to missing our connection in Naples, so the streets were quiet at that time of day on a Sunday.

At Certe Notti, Antonio and Ione were expecting us and showed us into their small office and checked us in. He looks a little bit like Gianni Versace (Was he the one who was killed by the crazy guy outside his home a few summers back? That’s the one I’m thinking of). He is very outgoing with good English, but Ione is very shy and doesn’t have a large English vocabulary. She looks like Amy Sedaris. It seems like she does most of the work, however. The have a golden retriever puppy named Romeo with whom I am now in love.





Our first floor room (not ground floor) has a white tile floor and balcony that overlooks an orangery and small grove of lemon and lime trees.



Mommy enjoys sitting out there for a smoke while I stay inside and wash out my clothes or try to catch up with my on-line journal. [Writing and keeping up with warp-speed travel is taking more time that I thought it would. I am writing this at the end of our first full day in Italy, July 7, 2008, so she and I have been doing quite a lot of that.]