The best things to do in Polignano a Mare are mostly free, mostly outdoors, and mostly a matter of being in the right place at the right hour rather than buying a ticket. This is a small town on a…
Supporting Guide
Modern Pompei: The Town Outside the Gates
Almost nobody looks up. You come out of the Pompei Scavi station, you turn left through the gate, you spend four hours in the first century, and you go back the way you came. The town two streets away does…
Climbing Vesuvius, and How to Combine It With Pompeii
There is one thing to know before anything else, and it is the thing that turns people away at the barrier every week. You cannot buy a ticket for the crater at the crater. There is no ticket office on…
Pompeii in the Heat, and With Children
Pompeii is a stone city with no roofs, built on a plain, facing south, with almost no trees. That sentence is the entire problem. Everything else in this guide follows from it. In July and August the site becomes an…
Pompeii With a Guide, or on Your Own?
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…
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…
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…
