Here is the difficulty with Pompeii, and it is not a difficulty you have at most ruins. The site is enormous, largely unlabelled at the level of detail that matters, and almost entirely legible only if you already know what…
Archives for August 2026
The Pompeii Day Trip: From Naples, Sorrento, Rome and the Amalfi Coast
Pompeii is a day trip for almost everybody who goes. Very few people stay in the modern town. They come out from somewhere else, spend a morning or a day, and go back. Which means the single most important decision…
How Long Do You Need in Pompeii?
The honest answer is that it depends on a question nobody asks themselves before they go, which is: do you want to see Pompeii, or do you want to be in it? Those are different visits and they take different…
How to Visit Pompeii: Tickets, Entrances and Skipping the Queue
Most of what goes wrong at Pompeii goes wrong before anyone sets foot inside. People arrive at the wrong gate. They queue for an hour in August for a ticket they could have bought on a phone. They buy the…
Herculaneum: The Complete Guide
You arrive at Herculaneum and the first thing you do is look down. The town is in a pit. The modern streets of Ercolano run along at their own level, ordinary and busy, and then the ground simply falls away…
Pompeii or Herculaneum: Which Should You Visit?
Almost everyone who comes to the Bay of Naples has heard of one of these places and not the other. That is the whole problem in a sentence. Pompeii is a name that arrives in childhood and never leaves. Herculaneum…
Lucca in August, and the House on the Lake
In August the towns give up. Lucca goes quiet inside its walls in a way that has nothing to do with peace. Half the shutters are closed. There are handwritten signs on the doors of the good places, back on…
Ischia, the Green Island
They call it l’isola verde and I assumed, before I came, that this was the kind of thing tourist boards decide in a meeting. It is not. The island really is green, and the green is the strange part, because…
The Best Photo Spots in Ischia
I have been photographed on this island and I have also photographed it, and the two jobs teach different things. In front of a camera you learn what light does to a face. Behind one you learn that a place…
The Perfect Ischia Itinerary
Ischia is larger than people expect, and that is the whole problem with planning it. Six comuni, a mountain in the middle, a ring road that takes an hour to loop. Get the order wrong and you spend the trip…
The Best Time to Visit Ischia
Most Italian islands give you one honest answer to this question, and it is usually June or September. Ischia is the exception, and the reason sits underground. The island is volcanic, and hot mineral water pushes up through the rock…
How to Get to Ischia
Ischia has no airport, no bridge and no tunnel, which is a large part of why it still feels like itself. You arrive by boat or you do not arrive at all. The crossing is short, cheap and frequent, and…
