Pompei
Italy · 40.7517° N / 14.4906° E · Mon 24 August 2026
Day trip, Monday 24 August: Napoli Garibaldi (08:26) to Pompei Scavi (09:02) on the Circumvesuviana, 22 km in 36 minutes, and back from Pompei town at 14:20, reaching Naples at 15:03.
Naples → Pompeii
Circumvesuviana, 08:26, out of Garibaldi. First one on the train — no surprises there.
I’d picked this service specifically because it has air conditioning, and I got to watch the conductor wake the whole thing up: lights, doors, and then the AC coming on, which on a Naples morning in August is the single most important thing anybody does all day.
By the time we left it was full. Tourists mostly — half a dozen languages going at once, all of them excited, all of them going to the same place.
But not everybody. Plenty of people stayed on past the stop for the ruins, on their way to work, or to see someone, or whatever people do on a Monday. That always gets me. You live here. History the rest of the world crosses continents for is just the stop before yours, and you’ve still got a shift to get to.
Going in
The entrance is across the road from the station, and it was already busy — a lot of people had clearly been queuing long before I turned up. Having bought a ticket in advance was the best decision I made all day.
Getting in was smooth. No problems at all. Just the crush of everyone funnelling down the one street and up the incline before the site proper opens out in front of you.
And then the heat. Not the weather — the stones. They’ve been sitting there absorbing sun for two thousand years and they hand every bit of it straight back at you. You feel it off the walls and up off the ground, and there’s no breeze down in the streets.
My bag had a water bottle in it, and I refilled it constantly from the fountains dotted around the site. Best free thing in Pompeii.
The street
Five hours in there, and I only left because of the heat.
What stopped me wasn’t the Forum, or a villa, or anything with a name on the map. It was a street.
Just a street. Nobody’s palace, nobody’s famous house. Walls up higher than your head on both sides, a raised kerb, the stone worn into ruts down the middle — and one side of it in deep shade while the other cooked.
That’s what got me. The shade. Because that isn’t an archaeological fact, it’s a practical one. Somebody knew this was the cool way to walk in August. Somebody used it as their route to the bakery, or down towards the sea, or just to get from their door to somebody else’s without frying.
Standing there, you stop thinking about buildings and start thinking about people. Which, for all the frescoes and the mosaics and the big set-piece stuff, is the thing I’ll actually take home.
The other thing caught me off guard completely: how much of it is still down there. Whole districts still under the pumice and the ash, unexcavated, waiting. You’re not looking at a ruin that has been fully revealed. You’re looking at the part they’ve got to so far.
It’s a city. Five hours can’t do a city justice. But after five hours of that heat coming back at me off the stones, I’d stopped taking anything in.
Getting back
The plan was to go back the way I came. The plan lasted about four minutes — the Circumvesuviana was full, no tickets available, and that was that.
So: food first, at a restaurant right next to the tourist station, where the prices know exactly why you’re there. Then a twenty-minute walk down to Pompei’s other station. The proper one. The one the town actually uses.
And it handed me an ending I wouldn’t have thought to plan. I went back to Naples with the people who live here rather than the people visiting — and the volcano went past the window on the way. The same volcano I’d seen from the train the previous morning, except now I’d spent five hours walking around what it did.
Back in Naples
Two hours flat out at the hotel. It’s round the corner from Garibaldi, which at this point in the trip I appreciate more than any view.
Then dinner at Fedel 2.0, just down the road, and an hour and a half of sitting there watching the two-way traffic outside: people hurrying in to catch trains home, and a fresh batch of tourists coming up out of the station with that slightly stunned look — right at the start of the thing I’m now most of the way through.
Then back to the hotel. Tired, still hot, and very ready for sleep.
Conditions — hot, and the stones gave it all back.
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08:02 The Circumvesuviana. Not a glamorous train, and not pretending to be.
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08:55 Vesuvius out of the window, getting closer.
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08:55
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09:15 Through the gate, and into a town that stopped in AD 79.
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09:19
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09:19
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09:20
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09:22
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09:24
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09:24 The basilica — the law courts, roofless now.
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09:25
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09:25
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09:30
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09:30
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09:31
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09:33
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09:34
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09:35 The Forum, with the mountain that did it standing at the end.
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09:52
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10:06
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10:08 A plaster cast of someone who did not get out.
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10:08
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10:15
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10:25
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10:28
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10:28 A bakery: the millstones still standing where they were left.
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10:28
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10:30
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10:33
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10:40
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10:42
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10:46
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10:48
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10:50 A bar counter, with the jars sunk into it.
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10:52
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10:53
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11:03
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11:03
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11:04
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11:06
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11:07
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11:07
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11:09
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11:11 Frescoes in a front room, framed like pictures.
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11:11
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11:12
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11:12
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11:13
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11:13 The House of the Faun — the bronze dancing where he always has.
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11:16
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11:16
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11:18
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11:22
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11:24
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11:25 Mosaic floor, laid two thousand years ago.
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11:37
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11:37
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11:42
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11:42
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11:44
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11:44
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11:44
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11:45
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11:47
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11:48
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11:54
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11:55 Stepping stones across the street, for when it flooded.
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12:03
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12:06
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12:07
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12:07
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12:07 A courtyard with its garden, and columns all the way round.
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12:09
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12:09
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12:13
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12:13
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12:16 Amphorae stacked against a wall.
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12:16
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12:19 The baths, and stucco ceilings that somehow survived all of it.
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12:19
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12:19
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12:20
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12:20 The floor of the hot room, raised up on its little brick piles.
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12:23
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12:42 Vesuvius over the top of everything, with a bronze in the foreground.
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12:46 A cloud building over the mountain, which is a joke in poor taste.
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14:08 Pompei Scavi station, where the plan fell apart.
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14:36
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17:50
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18:37 A beer, earned.
