We drove up to Napoli, spent a wearying day at Pompeii, and a couple of hours the next morning at Herculaneum.

First we crossed the Strait of Messina to Reggio di Calabria, home of the Bronzi di Riace statues, copies of which are at Caffe Riace in Palo Alto. Sadly, we couldn't take pictures of the statues. The ones at Caffe Riace are pretty good though.

Italians take their pistachios very seriously.

Coffee in some random Napoli cafe while waiting for Pasticceria Pintauro to open, said by our guide be the place for sfogliatelli, pastries which have kind of an inexplicable hard shell yet are soft on the inside. They were definitely worth the wait.

Piazza del Plebiscito.

The modern thing is to drape murals over construction projects showing how the building is going to look. The practice is even coming to California. This is the Teatro San Carlo.

An historic shopping mall, Galleria Umberto I.

An angel decorating a corner in the galleria.

Our efforts to drive to Pompeii were not completely successful. Instead of diving into the correct traffic jam and going to the main entrance, we avoided traffic jams, got turned away from a back entrance, and ended up at a secondary entrance after having parked in a residential section of town on an appropriately named street.

Vesuvius looming above the ruins of Pompeii.

The amazing preservation of Pompeii.

A typical street in old Pompeii. Note how many buildings were standing, especially in comparison to the Roman ruins in Tunisia. Are there more people on the street now than there were then?

There were several displays of plaster casts of suffocating Pompeii residents.

A garden inside a Pompeii house. Artist's interpretation thereof...

A lunch counter. The holes hold pots. It's kind of a steam table too.

In Villa dei Misteri, one room is covered with frescoes depicting a series of initiation rites of a young bride into the cult of Dionysus. This panel shows Silenus giving a satyr a drink, but the wide-eyed guy is the best part of the picture.

The original "Beware of Dog" (cave canem) warning, a mosaic at someone's front door.

Deep chariot ruts. Serious chariot rut researchers --- not the ones who start idiotic rumors on the Internet --- have determined that Pompeii had many of the features of modern traffic control, including no left turn corners and one way streets and the like. Not clear if they had right turn on red.

A fountain.

A bakery. These were flour grinders.

The frescoes in House of the Venus Marina.

A fancy tomb in the Necropolis.

More plaster casts.

Maurice and his pals who had been climbing along the top of the amphitheater, and raced down to play with our beards. They called us "Mose". Even more photos from Pompeii...

Herculaneum, a village close to Pompeii formerly on the coast. The eruption made the shoreline be about 1500 feet further away.

A statue of a deer attacked by dogs. if your house were buried by volcanic ash, how much would people pay in two thousand years to see your lawn ornaments?

Mosaic in the Women's Baths.

The mural from which the House of Neptune and Aphrodite was named.

An ancient coil of rope. If your garage were buried by volcanic ash, how much would people in two thousand years pay to see your blue polyethylene Chinese manufacture Home Depot rope? More photos from Herculaneum...

After we left Herculaneum, as we were driving through the hills outside Rome we came upon this little yard full of longhorn steers.

On to Sardinia