Naples

Our last port on the cruise was in Naples where we visited the Amalfi coast and Pompeii. It was a lot of fun and I want to go back again in the future.

Positano

This is a beautiful little town right on the Mediterranean Sea. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We took lots of pictures of the scenery because the views were so gorgeous!

Family with Vesuvius

Lovely cliffs

A fruit stall with giant lemons

The coastal town of Positano

The beautiful blue water

Sorrento

Sorrento is most known for it’s lemon products as there is an abundance of lemons which are bigger than any lemon I’ve seen before! They are about the size of a big grapefruits. The lemons are used to make products such as lemon soaps (Zoe loves the smell of lemon, so she smelled almost all the soaps we saw!), lemon chocolates and candies, pottery decorated with painted lemons, and maybe the most famous, limoncello liqueur.

The limoncello is sold in almost every shop we visited. People make it right in the back of their shops.  It comes in many different sized bottles, including some shaped like Italy and also some made to be carried in suitcases which cannot break and are made of plastic. Limoncello can be bought with milk to soften the liqueur, and can have flavours other than lemon, like strawberry and melon, although I don’t think those can be called limoncello.

A limoncello facility in the store

The bottles of limoncello

Yellow limoncello

The town was getting ready for the Christmas holiday and had many little Santas in the souvenir shops as well as a huge Christmas tree right in the middle of a round about. It was very festive and I thought it was fun to see what decorations were used for the holiday.

Christmas wreaths

The big tree in the roundabout

Pompeii

Our final and most exciting stop was to the city of Pompeii. This city is special because the whole city was buried under pumice and ash from the eruption of a nearby volcano, Mount Vesuvius. It was excavated by archaeologists and many buildings and artifacts were discovered. At the time of the eruption, other cities nearby were covered as well, but Pompeii is the most famous.

In the city, we visited a lot of well preserved buildings such as the forum, a temple to Apollo and Zeus, a bakery, a restaurant, a big house which probably belonged to a wealthy person, and a market. My favourite building was the bakery, because along with a couple old millstones which were used to grind wheat, there was an ancient pizza oven!

Family in the forum

The forum

The temple to Apollo

The outdoor market

Ancient pizza oven!

Quite a few artifacts were found in the buildings and put on display in the city. These include water jugs, tables, the tops of columns, and the plaster casts of people and a dog who died during the eruption. I was able to recognize the casts because I remember seeing a movie in school about Pompeii when we were studying volcanoes. The casts show what the people were doing during their final moments, which I found really sad. One was covering their face in order to protect it from the smoke and ash, and another is a pregnant lady who tried to save her baby by lying on her stomach to shield it. On the dog cast you can see how it was chained up with a collar around its neck so it wasn’t able to escape the eruption. There is a bin at the front of the casts where people can throw coins in to pay tribute to them, which I think is a beautiful way to remember the citizens who died in Pompeii.

The water jugs

A plaster cast of a citizen of Pompeii

Someone covering their face to protect it

The chained up dog

A pregnant lady trying to save her baby

Th Amalfi coast and Pompeii are amazing places and they are definitely in my top 5 favourite list of places visited in Italy.