Monday 15th September 2025 – Pompeii, Italy

 

We had an early start to catch the 08:18 train to Naples from the station next to the campsite. It was very crowded and we had to stand most of the way. One of the stops on the way was Herculaneum, another wonderful site caught in the same volcanic eruption as Pompeii. We have visited the site before and decided not to visit it again on this trip.
Arriving in the centre of Naples, we had a long walk through a shopping mall to get to the Metro where we caught a train to the Museo station, right next to the Naples National Archaeological Museum. Arriving at about 09:30, we avoided the rush and there was only a very short queue for tickets.
It is a huge spacious museum and it never felt crowded. We had avoided the weekend to visit as we had been warned that it was always busy and Monday turned out to be a very good choice as there were very few tour groups.
The museum does not have as many exhibits as the British Museum but the quality is breathtaking – beautiful frescoes and fantastically detailed mosaics, some with tesserae only 1 or 2mm across and looking more like paintings. I have never seen so many statues in wonderful condition. Vessels and other finds looked like they had been made yesterday.
The rooms dedicated to the Farnese Collection were interesting. Farnese was a 16^th Century collector who accumulated an extraordinary number of artefacts. He wanted a collection that showed the history of the Romans but this led to practices that would be considered to be unacceptable today. The collection contains fakes (16^th Century reproductions and inventions), heads on statues were replaced with ones that fitted the story and heads were modified to represent different people. A high proportion of the statues were not completely genuine.
There was an excellent section on the Greeks in Italy where we had to put on shoe coverings in order to protect the excellent Roman mosaic floors that were in every room. Excellent information boards told the story of the Greeks and their travels in the area and the finds were as good as those in the Athens museum.
At the4 end of the visit, we decided to take a look at a special exhibition on the top floor that was devoted to the theft and recovery of archaeological finds. It was absolutely fascinating, with lots of stories of individual cases of recovery as well as background information such as the fact that in 2020 the Italian authorities retrieved 46,000 stolen artefacts.
That brought an end to our 7 hour visit to the museum and we retraced our morning journey, once again standing most of the way on the train back to Pompeii.
Photos: The House of Julia Felix in Pompeii produced a fascinating series of fresco panels showing everyday life in the city – here pots, pans, fabric and bread are being sold in front of a colonnade; This 1^st century AD bronze statue from Herculaneum is of Livia, wife of Augustus (emperor 27 BC to 14 AD) – the detail in the folds of cloth and the face are beautiful; Bust of Emperor Caracalla dated to 212 AD shortly after he was assassinated – part of the Farnese Collection and original, although it was removed from a badly damaged statue; Sarcophagus from AD200 depicting drunken Hercules joining Dionysus in a procession; The label for this 1^st century AD mosaic says that it is a ‘Cook Fight’ but I think that it should be ‘Cock Fight’ – the detail and the variety of colours is amazing; Late 2^nd or early 1^st century BC mosaic of street musicians – again using tiny tesserae, note the shadows!; A Greek krater dating from the 4^th century BC with scenes of the afterlife; Part of a 1^st century AD fresco from Pompeii, which shows that, even in Roman times, a visit to the hairdresser can go horribly wrong – this was the first time that she had looked in the mirror.