Today marked the second big sightseeing day of this trip after Segesta, an excursion to Pompeii. Despite only about one third of the excavated area being accessible these days it took most of the morning and afternoon to see all of it. In the process I walked over 12 km so it probably doesn't count as a rest day after all.

It was a busy day on the Decvmanvs today with swarms of tourists filling up the sidewalks, occupying the rare corners in the shades of buildings whose walls are still extant. Even in the late morning there was a long queue at the Lvpanar, mostly guided tours in various languages, so I skipped that building entirely. No worries though, the images of the interior are well known and reproduced everywhere.

Hiking through the ancient roads and through dead people's private rooms can be demanding as sidewalks extend 30 cm or more above the road. I imagine the road surface was covered in deep mud and dirt in ancient times. I haven't seen it spelled out but I got the impression that the way entrances and exits of accessible buildings are arranged they expect visitors to move around the area in clockwise direction. I had chosen the opposite and usually hit the exit of a building first, went to the other side to enter, and then had to circle back to the entrance to continue. As a result the GPS track of today shows a bunch of loops where I backtracked like that.

Sadly a few of the structures that I was especially interested in were closed off, including the casa del cinghiale or "boar house", whose eponymous mosaic was luckily visible from the threshold. Likewise the famous cave canem mosaic which as it turns out lost a lot of its former colors to UV light. Other mosaics and affreschi retained their old glory, including a number of raunchy ones.

What the site lacks is explanatory panels. There were a few in some places, especially around works of art, but not nearly at an adequate density for a complex of that size. Around the more important bits I compensated by tacking on to some guided tour to get the gist of what I was looking at.

All in all Pompeii is as spectacular as advertised. The art, the architecture, the history, the scenic (and fatal!) location at the foot of a volcano -- the site is worth seeing in every respect. The flip side of the coin is that I now have to sift through hundreds of photographs I took to pick a handful to accompany this article. But that's more of a luxury problem to have.

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