Day 13-Italy, Pompeii

Got my first obvious blister today! 11 hours of walking around seeing incredible stuff will do that to you, that's for sure.

Today we caught a train to Naples, beginning our morning with a tour of the Napoli Library to see the Herculanium Scrolls. We were able to see the papyri fragments outside their glass enclosures, which was amazing! I also learned BYU played a huge role in discovering the papyri's contents with the use of photographic advancements (something about creating images in the spectrum a human eye is unable to detect). Makes me proud to be a cougar :)

The next portion of our day was spent at the National Archeological Museum of Naples where we looked at the statue of the spear bearer, a whole slew of Greek and Roman sculpture, and one of my favorite mosaics of all time: The Alexander Mosaic. It was incredible and much larger than I expected :D

Our only break of the day was for lunch, so naturally I wanted a donut...it was huge and cheep, but made me kind of sick after awhile so I fed the last part to some pretty entertaining pigeons. It was a party.

Pompeii was our final stop of the day, in which we spent at least 4 or 5 hours taking in the ruins of one of the most spectacular places I've ever been to. We got a private tour of one of the villas, led by Mario where on one occasion I walked around a corner and almost stepped on the body of one of Pompeii's victims. It was so crazy!

By the last half of our time in Pompeii's ruins, our group was singing Hercules songs and getting pretty delirious...clear signals we had had a busy and tiring day. It was so fun, though, and an excellent last day to spend in Pompeii :)