Back to Pompeii..

It’s strange to think we have seen almost all of Italy. We have been up and down this country, on the coast and in the mountains and we still have a week to go. Overall it’s been close to perfect in the weather department. We have had beautiful sunny days almost the entire time. We didn’t see a cloudy day until we reached Venice. After catching a plane from Rome to Venice we caught a ferry to our hotel and on a very cold tour of the city. Most of us did a considerable amount of complaining over the next two days but to be fair, it was snowman weather without the snow. But however foggy and windy it was for the deration of our stay in the islands of Venezia it was still an interesting city. Being a big tourist city there was lots of shopping and the place was decorated with amazing Venetian masks in every store window. The culture was different too. We learned, with the help of our wonderful guide Giacamo, that Venetians even speak a different dialect than the rest of Italy.

But I am a little late posting this so I want to go back a week and talk about our stay in Sorrento and our tour at Pompeii. It was great to finally get to visit Pompeii because it was one of the sites that I had a little background knowledge on. What I didn’t expect was the size of the city and the vineyards surrounding it still in production. The place was surprisingly big and big on wine as well. It took us about 2 hours to walk through and we skipped almost half of the town to go and see the theatre and the vineyards. In an article we r

ead about wine and wealth in ancient Italy, we learned thatwine was sort of a risky business and a very high status commodity in ancient times. It was associated with an aristocratic lifestyle and quickly different statuses and types of wine arose from many locations and different growing techniques. It was one of the only sources of alcohol and the seasonal changes posed a big threat to the delicate vines. Pompeii was a big wine producer before the destruction of the city but we learned that they were not big importers of exporters. The wine was a local business.

Today it is still mostly sold locally as well and it is more of a tourist attraction of the vineyards added to the site of the ruins. After the eruption, however, there was a surprise benefit to wine growing. The ash made the soil more fertile and good for growing. Although its not booming business, Pompeii wine is among some of the better quality wines in Italian production.