Kicked out of our lovely hostel, due to remodeling issues, we headed a smidge north to Pompei to see the famous ruins....I had read about them in my National Geographic Traveler Magazine as an excellent visit.
The town of Pompei will not be highly recommended on my list of visited cities. It is small, uninteresting, unfriendly and a bit dirty. Mafia run? Don't know, just heard it wasn't very safe. We even got in trouble for laying in the grass by a church! Oh well, it didn't really matter, because all we were really doing was touring the ruins and using the hotel as a stop over on our return to Rome. Molly and I bought the last entrance tickets of the day. We went into the walled city in the late afternoon and walked out at dusk, which proved to be a very nice time to see the pillars and columns and arches in the fading light and sunset.
More interesting than the ruins themselves were the dogs around the ruins. Apparantly, in ancient Roman times, the dogs of Pompei were respected and honored. To this day, they still are. Homeless, stray dogs live throughout the area. They all have collars and are tagged. They are fed and given vaccines. There is an adoption program sponsored by an area animal rights group trying to find these lonely canines permanent homes. Molly and I wanted to adopt all of them.
By the end of our walk around the huge site, we had three dogs following us and we didn't feed them anything! One of them stood by a water fountain and when I turned it on, he drank from it just like an old pro. They followed us out of the walled city and onto the streets of Pompei. I kept telling them to "go home", but I realized they probably only understand Italian dog commands, of which I knew none. A man stopped on the sidewalk to give the dogs a treat and Molly and I crossed the street and hid in a store for awhile.
Sadly, we didn't see those dogs again and I can only hope they get adopted by someone Italian soon. For me, the dogs were the highlight of Pompei.
