1966 Alfa Romeo Giulia – Vesuvius and Pompeii

We do a lot in one day. Too much. Today, the adventure is first Pompeii, and then Vesuvius.

Before we get too deep into this trip, the other parts of this journey are here:
1966 Alfa Romeo – Road Trip
1966 Alfa Romeo – Vesuvius and Pomepii
1966 Alfa Romeo – Perugia
1966 Alfa Romeo – Pisa & Manarola

Oops.  We just missed the Pompeii exit, so now we will do Vesuvius and then Pompeii!  Do we look like we care?

We stopped along the way for pictures with the Alfa Romeo.  Aey made a tiny little movie, it looks like it came from the 1960s.  Aey took the first photo, and then Jake took a photo of Aey taking a picture of me.  Love that little guy.

 

 

When you get close to Vesuvius National Park, you need to park the car.  There is no parking lot, except for a very long line of cars parked alongside the road and this curbside parking is managed by the National Park employees. The great news was they all seemed to have grown up with Alfa Romeo Giulias when they were kids, so we got the very first spot. It literally saved us 2 kilometres (1.5 miles) of walking. They were all asking permission to take their photo with the car.

Vesuvius was much better than I expected.  In fact, it was spectacular, and we really loved it.  The climb was ‘easy’, literally anyone can do it, if you just take your time.   The trail is very dusty. There are 3 stations along the way, that sell water, ice cream and tourist stuff.  I highly recommend Vesuvius to everyone.  You buy some tickets, and just start walking.

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I reset my phone so I could measure how many steps it takes to go up and down Vesuvius, and it is 8563 and 2.6 miles (4.2km).  What was surprising is that we climbed 34 floors.

It was already 14:00 (2 PM) when we finished Vesuvius, so we needed to run over to Pompeii.  It is only a 20-minute drive.  We needed to get moving!

Pompeii was every bit as great as we thought it would be.  To see the artwork, the architecture, the plumbing and their relatively modern life was something I always read about as a kid, but now got to experience it firsthand.   We did not take very many pictures, as I think we were just dazed by the scale and beauty, along with the heat.  Please enjoy what we saw.

Did I mention the car had a minor break down?  Oh yeah, the roads in Pompeii are so rough, that a 50-year-old tie rod end finally said it wanted to die, and broke on me. I drove the car rattling down the road to our hotel in Sorrento.  I got online, googled ‘Alfa Romeo classic cars Sorrento‘ and found The Spider Lifestyle.  I called the number at 19:00 (7 PM) and a very nice man answered and helped me immeasurably.  His name was Sergio, and he quickly connected me with his 2 favourite mechanics.  In the morning, I was on the closest mechanics door at 08:00 (8 AM).  I had to do a little begging to make him drop everything.  He did not have the spares with him, so he got on his Vespa and went away for a good 1.5 hours and came back with the perfect replacement part.  By 11:30 I was back in action.  We were supposed to have an easy travel day to Perugia, but the morning was consumed with car things, so we needed to rush a bit. Here are some photos of Allesandro’s shop, and the car on the lift.

I do hope you enjoyed this part of the trip.  It certainly fulfilled a lifetime dream of mine and I am glad I could share it with my wife and boy.

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