Travel Blog — Italy Day 3

Sourin Rao
5 min readJun 23, 2022

Herculaneum/Mount Vesuvius

Picture from the crater of Mt. Vesuvius

All of us have definitely read about the destruction that the volcano eruption that buried Pompeii in 79AD. Maybe our first lessons about the devastating nature of volcanos that we learn in school. This was very much, at least on my mind, when I was first planning the trip to Italy.

All along I’d thought that a visit to Pompeii may be well worth the effort, but some online research told me that it might be better to visit the neighboring town of Herculaneum and combine that with a visit to the cause of this calamity i.e. Mount Vesuvius on the same day. And so that's what we did on Day 3.

Naples is a short 1 hr train ride away from Rome and we took the early morning train to Naples. To get to the site you need to board a local inter-city train to a town called Ercolano and the train experience was something similar to riding the local trains in Mumbai during rush hour. The train was bursting with people crammed into each other, inside the compartments.

On the train, I felt right at home since this is what I was used to, for my college commute, growing up but for the kids, this was a freaky and interesting experience. Grating your body against some stranger's bodies to get from point A to point B was something that was just outside of their comprehension. Nevertheless, we arrived intact and in one…

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Sourin Rao

Mid-way thru life its been an awesome journey thus far. Marathon runner, blogger, technologist, son, brother, husband and father. Life long learner with awe