Happy New Year!
Our son, Oliver is 6 and is obsessed with natural disasters like earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis and volcanoes. Of particular interest to him was the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius on the city of Pompeii in year 79. We love travel and decided to spend the holiday season traveling to Italy, focusing on Rome but spending a day in Amsterdam on the way. People seem to like to go to warmer spots in the winter, but Italy has been on our list for a while and we found a Black Friday deal we couldn’t pass. My wife also found tickets for a day tour of Pompeii with some time in nearby Naples.
Once we purchased tickets for the trip, we excitedly prepared by getting a couple travel books about Rome (Rick Steves book is the best), as well as watching Rick Steves 3 Rome episodes on PBS and watching as many documentaries about Rome and Pompeii as we could. We even watched Gladiator.
We arrived in Rome on Christmas day, which was, as expected, unusually quiet for the city. After a great dinner in our neighborhood with homemade pasta carbonara, a heavenly Italian red wine, a Neopolitan pizza and a perfect tiramisu, we found a huge neighborhood playground and Oliver immediately starting making friends. You can see a frame from this moment at the very last image below.
The weather was lovely and mild. The highs were in the upper 50s, but somehow with the sun and the euphoria that accompanies exotic new locations, it felt more like 70. The timing was perfect as we had been watching the weather in the weeks leading up to the trip and arrived just after a week of straight rain.
It was immediately apparent was that the light in Rome was unusually lovely. Like Los Angeles, but even softer. There is an amber haze that seems to flatter everything and mysteriously, there was no harsh noon light. It always looked like the sun was low in the sky like morning sunrise or evening sunset. We saw the sun every day and this pattern of beautiful light remained throughout the trip.
The next day we spent at the Colosseum, also walking around nearby neighborhoods. We had the best gelato we’ve ever had (tip: avoid the bright artificial colors and make sure it’s not whipped with air as it often is in the US) and some of the best espresso, pasta, pizza and wine in Rome and Naples.
Oliver is also a Lego addict and a great builder, so it was a happy find to see “I Love Lego” exhibit at Palazzo Bonaparte, one of the many art museums in Rome.
We tried one of the “hop on/hop off” bus tours, which was a painless way to get around the city and get one’s bearings, but we still walked an average of 8-9 miles a day. We checked out the Pantheon, the Vatican, the ruins of the Roman Forum, and countless other sites. While all major European cities are old and have a rich history, Rome is unique in the sheer scale and volume of it’s 2000+ year old sites, a remaining byproduct of a former empire that covered Europe and part of Asia and northern Africa.
The bus tour to Pompeii is 3 hours each way, with stops in the middle to stretch and get a snack and a local espresso. The tour guide on the bus, Valentina, was truly amazing and the other guide once we got to Pompeii, Giuseppe, was hilarious. Oliver was gathering “treasures” during the tour, finding old stones, actual pieces of ancient terra-cotta pottery and some of the 2000 year old volcanic ash from the Vesuvius eruption. Oliver showed his finds to the tour guide, who referred, sweetly, to Oliver as “the bambino” and confirmed that he did actually find a piece of terra cotta pottery. The tour guide comedically and strategically made the Pompeiian brothels kid-friendly an even told a few funny jokes for people paying attention. He would often punctuate his sentences with “Okey dokey artichokey.”
On the way back to Rome, we stopped in Naples for an hour or so. Naples is definitely a much denser city and requires greater fortitude and strong elbows to brave the heavier crowds. From the edge of town, Mt. Vesuvius is visible (you’ll see a color photo of this below).
I highly recommend both Rome and Amsterdam. Naples was good (and I do recommend Pompeii tour), but I’ve heard Florence or Venice might be a better pairing with Rome. PS. Wear comfortable shoes that are already broken in. It was a wonderful trip. I would have loved to spend more time in Amsterdam, but we were grateful for every minute.
In the spirit of traveling light, I brought one camera with one lens.
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