Italy – Day Five

Italy

Day Five – 7 April 2016

Weather: Sunny, cloud, 22

Steps: 8,786

Another relaxing morning. I was out on the street by nine and watched a bus with a 4×4 Vesuvius sign on it drive by and I begin to wonder if I’ve been forgotten, but soon enough a small 24-seater slows down and I go across the street to get aboard so that they don’t have to cross.

I find the bus full except the middle back seat. Which I don’t mind normally, but the other seats were occupied by three women and a man who were all a bit robust in size. I had no worries about the driver hitting the brakes and sending me flying. It’s a wonder they didn’t need a crowbar to get me out. We had a good laugh over that.

It’s a one-hour drive to the base of Vesuvius from Sorrento and on the way our guide, Laura, gives us some background on the mountain. It is a 1281m (4203 ft) high stratovolcano but used to be a thousand feet higher and somewhat wider. The entire mountain is actually part of the Mt. Somma complex. Vesuvius is merely the cone that has grown up out of the obliterated top of Mt. Somma. In this pic, it shows the current remnants of the original volcano and outlines the likely size of Mt. Somma which collapsed in on itself twenty-five thousand years ago.

This phenomenon is seen in other volcanoes around the world and they are all called Somma Volcanoes.

Vesuvius is still an active volcano and considered one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world due to the three million people who live around the mountain and well within its grasp. The inhabited areas around the volcano have been divided into zones. The red zone is the closest, then the orange and then blue. The families in the area have all been assigned another family that they would stay with in the case of an evacuation.

And in parts of the red zone, permanent homes are no longer permitted. Only hotels and industrial buildings are allowed and the government is offering incentives to people to move away from the area so that the number needed to be relocated in an emergency would be reduced. As it stands, they expect up to three weeks’ notice before an eruption and need seven days to evacuate. They hope to reduce that to three days.

Given how close Naples is to the summit, three days would be nice.

The volcano has erupted dozens of times since 79 CE but none have been as explosive as the Pompeii eruption. After Mt. Somma collapsed twenty-five thousand years ago, the Vesuvius cone formed and nineteen thousand years ago, the characteristics of its eruptions changed. Vesuvius now routinely produced the same kind of explosive eruptions seen in 79CE. The eruption can produce a column of gas and ash that reach into the stratosphere. If that column collapses, it can produce a deadly pyroclasic flow. These eruptions can also produce a lot of noise as in the case of Krakatoa. This type of eruption is called Plinian Eruptions after Pliny the Younger who documented the 79 CE eruption.

More recently, Vesuvius erupted in 1906 when Naples was preparing to host the Olympic Games, which then had to be relocated and the funds diverted to reconstruction. In 1944, its last eruption, it destroyed a village on the slopes and the funicular that was built on its slopes.

And today, it is quiet.

Our first stop is to the winery Cantina del Vesuvio for a bathroom break (and we return here for lunch).

Then we get back aboard and the guide lets me sit in the front seat with her. It’s a few minutes to the entrance of the Vesuvius National Park that now protects the slopes from habitation. Here, we transfer onto huge 4×4 trucks and take a winding switchback road up the slope.

The area is forested for most of the drive and barring any eruptions in the near future, the trees will grow to the top. They feel this is why the slopes were first inhabited. The forested slope looked like a simple mountain, not an active volcano.

Boy, did they get a surprise at some point.

We get off the trucks here and start a hike to the top.

Hike is a good term. It’s not a walk even though the trail is well marked. The footing is loose lava peddles and the path is cut into the slope with a rope barrier. Get too close and slip, there would be no stopping until you reached the trees a few hundred feet down.

It’s not a dangerous trail, but anyone with mobility issues would have a problem. Wheelchairs and walkers would be impossible.

There is seismological equipment off the trail. Please don’t shake it or you’ll make three million people very very angry.

It takes about thirty minutes to make the climb and we come to a small shop at the entrance to the crater rim. I could have stopped to listen to the guide repeat what Laura already told us or keep walking.

I kept walking.

It was another twenty minutes to get to the other side of the crater rim trail. (There’s a car park on that side of the mountain, while the side I came on is only accessible by the 4×4). The trail on the rim is much wider and it’s easy to stop at any spots to take pics.

It’s massive!

The layer of white rock is remnants from the 1944 eruption. Apparently, at that time, the entire crater was filled to that point and the crater was a flat plain.

The views of the Sorrentine Peninsula is fabulous even with the hazy/smokey air. Capris is the distance.

It’s not as easy to see Pompeii as I expected. It’s at the end of the long straight road in the centre of the picture.

We got just under an hour at the top and had to estimate the time it would take to get back down the trail. It only took fifteen minutes.

From here, we headed back to our bus below and then back to the Cantina del Vesuvio where we were treated to lunch and wine.

For the wine drinkers, they got a tasting of four types of wine and it wasn’t long before we figured out that if you drank what was in the glass, it got refilled. They were very generous. The guy at the end of my table was happy to finish his in order to get more, so I helped him out. I moved my glass in his direction. He would polish it off and I’d move it back in front of me to be refilled. After double dipping for a bit, it was obvious he was feeling no pain and I figure his wife is still cursing me.

We had spaghetti for the main course and the tomato sauce was simple and delicious. One of the waitresses walked around with a huge – and I mean huge – bowl of spaghetti to offer us seconds. We had to clear a quarter of the table just so she could lay it down.

She gave extra to the guy at the end of the table figuring he would need the pasta to soak up the wine.

Then they laid out the dessert liquor in cute little curvy wine glasses. It smelled like peach schnapps, so I downed mine. The guy at the end of the table pushed his towards me and in the end, I had four.

Then as I sat there looking pleased with myself, the guy at the end of the table said I might not feel so good when the waitress comes to the table with a lighter and says “hey, where did all the candles go?”

I just about spit it all back up.

It was either going to be a very quiet or very noisy ride back to Sorrento. Or one with a lot of stops along the way.

We finished up and the owner’s wife came out to thank us for coming told us a bit about the history of the winery. She showed us pictures of how they used to transport the wine to Naples in the fifties – with horse and cart. Then showed us a picture of their first truck which had the license plate number Naples 7, meaning it was among the first vehicles in Naples.

She noted that all the men loading the barrels were all dressed in their Sunday best. Guess they were looking forward to a good time in Naples.

We were shown the bottling area where they bottle about sixty-thousand a year but no longer sell to outside vendors. They sell it all themselves. They prefer quality to quantity.

I like some of the posters.

When we were done, we headed back to Sorrento and I got dropped off at 4:30. I thought about going back to the town centre, but my feet told me no. They want to be saved for Rome.

No problem. I spent the evening packing up for my first move. Tomorrow…Rome!

 

 

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