Messina and Pompei, Italy

Sicily is the big island in the middles of the Mediterranean that, if you look at a map, looks like it’s getting kicked in the pants by the boot of Italy. My attraction to the place is based mostly on the role it plays in Godfather trilogy, although I know that’s ridiculous considering all of the serious history, modern and ancient, that the place contains. The two major cities in Sicily are Palermo and Messina. Palermo is usually the destination of tourists, although to be honest it’s not much for that. More people speak English in Palermo, maybe that’s the attraction. The shopping is better in Messina, but the population there doesn’t expect too many tourists and it doesn’t cater there to the demographic. By that I mean they don’t have very many tourist shops, not very many people that speak English, and not very many shops stay open during siesta (1-4 pm).

I had a training meeting to go do in the morning, and the free lunch aboard seemed attractive now that the Euro has gotten so much stronger since the American re-election. By the time I went out with friends it was 1 pm, and there wasn’t a single thing open in Messina, Sicily. But the best part about Messina, perhaps, is the fact that it is not a tourist town, and that if you stop and watch for a bit, you’ll see a normal day in Sicily. Often a drawback of heavily touristed areas is that you don’t get an idea of what a normal day in that country looks like.

A normal afternoon in Messina isn’t very interesting, let me tell you. They have some statues they are very proud of, and the largest mechanical clock in Europe (which doesn’t, and never did, work), and several large and stately cathedrals. But the streets are quiet and the shops are shuttered.

Cafes are open, so we had some coffee and later some gelato. The weather was perfect, so a walk around the deserted shopping area wasn’t totally lost.

We sailed north, up the coast of mainland Italy, last night and docked this morning in Naples, Italy. Many of the passenger tours were called off this morning because of the rain and the cold(ish) weather around here. Naples is the closest port to Pompei though, and rain did not deter us from seeing that place.

Pompei was a doomed city of ancient times. The first evidence of life (that has been found) place the beginnings of Pompei around the 7th century B.C., although the interesting stuff didn’t start happening until the first century A.D. In the 60′s A.D. there was a terrible earthquake that shocked the city and required substantial rebuilding afterwards. The rebuilding, apparently, was shoddy at best in some places, where they substituted solid marble columns for marble-covered brick columns to save time and money. Maybe they knew the place was doomed. Probably not, though.

In 79 A.D., nearby Mt. Vesuvius – still, to this day, an active volcano – blew it’s top and covered Pompei with 6 meters of ash and rock. Apparently people didn’t have much warning, since the disaster seems to have killed a good deal of people that seem to have been going along in a normal day. The ashes preserved not the bodies of some of the victims, but the outlines of their bodies. Archeologists years later found these strange holes in the ash and filled them with plaster. The result was full castes of the bodies of people killed in the disaster. Children with their mothers, grown men cowering in the corners, people laying where they ultimately fell. There were even carbonized loaves of bread found in the bakery. It’s morbidly interesting.

But, just like the people were preserved, so was the town. Some of the dwellings still have the original, 2,000-year-old wall paintings up, some of the old shops still have the names of the shops painted on the front. I’m told that the brothel still has 2,000-year-old pornography on the walls!