40 37.909N 014 35.910E Almafi, Italy
Pipedream
Thu 6 May 2010 14:04
Still no internet at the marina but we were able to find an internet cafe complete with a 27 year old part time Australian waitress who happens to be a PT on holiday here in Italy. (Antony went over there again today...) We got in about mid day from Capri about a 20 mile motor boat ride. Hung out for the rest of the day and caught the bus into Pompeii the next morning. Very interesting and very exhausting. The city was buried in volcanic mud by nearby Vesuvius in 79 AD after a major earth quake a few years before - guess they didn't take the hint. They still haven't dug it all out yet - streets lead you into the side of a very large hill with modern building on top. As you descend into the valley of Pompeii you see an urban sprawl around Vesuvius that fills the entire valley. In 79 AD there were about 60,000 people living there. There must be close to a million now. Kind of like re-building New Orleans in the same place without really changing the levee system... George made the observation that Pompeii was just one of hundreds of Roman towns caught in a kind of geologic snap shot in time. There were many signs of reusing building materials etc. in the city and that is how many were just torn down and continuously rebuilt through time into what we have today.
George and I went on a tour of a paper mill here in Almalfi that is supposed to be the oldest in Europe... "Almafi gave Europe paper" the sign reads. It was originally built in the 12th century and they still turn on the water powered machines to demonstrate how paper was made. A note to my engineering minded friends... the thing would work again today if it had not been flooded in 1949 and replaced by a more economical process in Milan.
I took the day off today, George took the bus to Naples with our American boat neighbors and Antony is recovering from an excursion yesterday to look at some caves in south Italy that were inhabited by real Italians until only about 20 years ago... and I thought we were the only ones with a West Virginia. All for now I have to get my afternoon siesta in before meeting Antony at the Supermarcado at 5:00 PM. Tomorrow we are heading north to Procida or Ischia an island group at the north end of the Golfo di Napoli.