Not far from the Amalfi Coast and under the watchful eye of Mount Vesuvius is the famous Roman City of Pompeii, as most people know Pompeii was totally buried by the Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Its now a tourist mecca and a very interesting place to visit. And funny enough it’s not far from the start of the autostrada which is a toll road in that section, you pay your 1.50 euro, travel about 150 meters to the Pompeii exit and then get off! Now that’s a money spinner. Pompeii is a huge archaeological area and takes about 3 hours to do the most popular items on the tourist map. The only building we didn’t get into was the brothel, it was very popular for some reason, when we arrived to have a look, it had just been converged on by three large tour groups. The brothel is very popular as it contains mosaics for the customers, as they didn’t all speak Latin if they were from different parts of the Roman Empire. They would simply point at the girl and then the appropriate mosaic of what they wanted. We did get to see it on a postcard and Emma got some footage.

Overall Pompeii is a shell of what it was like, but from the remaining ruins and the mosaic, frescos and statues contained within them you can see a small aspect of their society and after watching countless shows and documentaries on the town its great to see it first hand.

From Pompeii we traveled North to the city of Tivoli about 30 km’s East of Rome. You’d think with a town of that size they would have a hotel! No, we found one four star with a great view from above the city, but out of our price range. The hotels we wrote down as being located in Tivoli were actually about 10 km’s away in another town, go figure. Unfortunately, the hotel we had choosen was full but the manager kindly rang around for us and all the other decent hotels in that town were also full. As it turned out Italia Post was having a conference in the town, finally he said he had a hotel for us but it was in a different town, which was fine by us, it was either that or stay at a motel.

So off we went to the Fabio Hotel, and what an interesting hotel it was, the owner/manager was a retired airforce pilot (he didn’t speak any English), and spent his time smoking cigars and maintaining the hotel garden when we arrived. He left his 4 small dogs to look after reception and they would bark whenever anyone would enter or leave the hotel letting him know. The interior was all decorated with his airforce memorabilia, and for breakfast in the morning he was wearing a suit serving tea and coffee to the guests, insisting he baked all the cakes himself, and yes they were very nice. He left all the real work for his night manager that luckily for us spoke some English. A nice but quirky hotel and we would recommend it if you are in the area.

Anyway why did we go to Tivoli, to visit the Villa D’este or the famous Tivoli Gardens, one of the best in Europe. The gardens are part of an old Roman Villa located on the hillside of the town. Its best viewed in the photo gallery than described here, other than to stay it’s a formal garden with elaborate water features, fountains, water channels in the stair railings and even fountains inside the villa itself. The villa complements the garden design to be part of the garden itself and has balconies that provide symmetry to continue the lines of stairs and fountains up the side of the villa itself. The gardens today also contain some modern art to complement the existing garden features. Being so close to Rome, only 30km away, the gardens get swamped with day-trippers but once gain they don’t tend to arrive till 10am, so go early or late.

The Roman Web gallery