Pompeii: Day 5

Today we had a guided tour of the ruins at Pompeii. It was really cool to see the town you hear is destroyed from one volcano hold so much history. In the distance of the ruins you could see Mt. Vesuvius too. The paintings in Pompeii were really interesting. It said that by discovering these paintings it allowed for a new debate to be opened on the whole issue of Roman art and decided that the paintings can be divided into four styles. Before discovering Pompeii, there was very little informtion about Roman painting and only had a few examples of fragments of frescos found in isolated cases. The sculptures in Pompeii were very interesting also because there weren't many that were large in scale. It is obvious that they had a preference for statues of small size since they were designed for ornamental purposes for rooms and gardens, however there are some large statues that were generally situated in the Forum. It was incredible to see how this town could be preserved after something so catastrophic. Once our tour of Pompeii was over we had a few hours as we traveled to Brindisi to catch our overnight ferry to Greece. On the way there we stopped for lunch at a service station and of course that was time consuming since we had such a large group. Once we were on the cruise ship it got us all really excited not only for Greece in general, but since it was basically a mini cruise ship that was foreshadowing the last few days of our trip. It wasn't the typical ferry all of us were thinking, it was a large ship that could hold 800 cars alone! We were all exhausted so we tried to get a good nights sleep since we'd be docking at Patras early in the morning.