We visited Herculaneum today and as soon as we arrived at the visitor centre we were asked for our Covid vaccination certificates. It hadn’t even crossed our minds that we might need them apart from on our arrival in Italy, so we had left them, along with all of our other paperwork, at the hotel! We were completely dismayed, but luckily we remembered that the documentation was saved on our phones so we were allowed in! Even though Herculaneum was familiar to me because we visited it on our last trip here five years ago, I was still amazed by how well the town had been preserved by the pyroclastic flow that engulfed it so quickly in AD 79. It was a very hot day so we wandered slowly amongst the ruins of shops and villas and bath houses, where we could still see the mosaic floors, statues, and terracotta pots from two thousand years ago.
We travelled there and back by train, and it stopped at many, many stations along the way, taking just over an hour from Sorrento. So on the way back we were happy to pay eight extra euros each to go on the “Campania Express” which pulled into the station just as we got there. However it made almost as many stops and turned out to be only five minutes faster than the normal train!
We went straight back to the hotel and into the pool for a lovely swim before going out for dinner in Sorrento, in La Favorita restaurant which was very pretty because it was full of lemon trees. I had Fritelli de fiorilli which are courgette flowers stuffed with ricotta cheese and fried; they were delicious.
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