We then headed back to the train station to catch the metro to the National Archeological Museum, which houses the artifacts that were excavated from Pompeii. We thought this would be very straight forward as our guidebook thoroughly laid out directions: purchase ticket at tabaco shop, validate in little yellow machine, get on line 2 (which is faster than line 1), go one stop, and walk five minutes to museum. Easy. So we purchase our metro tickets, we walk past all the yellow validation machines for line 1, and we get to line 2 and there are no validation machines... Being the worrier that I am, I was too concerned by this to get on the train. After looking everywhere for a validation machine we finally found a police officer who told us that the tickets we had bought are only good for line 1, not line 2. What? There are different tickets for each line of the metro system?? That makes no sense at all. Thank you guidebook for totally missing it on that one! The police officer did not know enough English to tell us how to purchase the correct ticket, and after some frustrating searching we gave up and found a taxi. This in and of itself was an experience. If you've been to Italy you may have noticed that there are no lines marking lanes on the roads. If room permits, they make two lanes, or three if it's really busy, and they zip around fast. As soon as we got in the car we were instructed not to wear seatbelts (there weren't any buckles anyway) so I just held onto mine for dear life as our driver weaved around the traffic. As insane as it all is, the traffic functions very smoothly. It's like organized chaos.
We made it to the museum alive and only a little frazzled, but we were thoroughly exhausted. It was really cool to see all the mosaics from Pompeii, especially before we visited (more on that later!), but I think we would have benefitted from a guided tour. It's actually quite a large collection even though it seemed that half of the museum was closed for renovation!
We used our metro line 1 ticket from earlier to get back to the train station (at least it wasn't a waste of money!) and made our way to Sorrento. We were so glad to get there. It was much more calm and relaxed than Naples. We checked in to our hotel and found that we had been given a free upgrade to a room with a balcony on the Main Street! We then took a relaxing stroll through the town, looking at the shops, and stopped for dinner at Inn Buffalito. Their fondue sorrentina was soooo good! It was like deconstructed pizza with the mozzarella fondue in tomatoe sauce and foccacia bread for dipping. Yum!
Tomorrow we explore Pompeii!
No comments:
Post a Comment