Moving on......

Our week of travelling around the Roman archaeological remains of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Campania has come to an end. I cannot recommend enough the tour operator that we went with, Andante Travels ( http://www.andantetravels.co.uk ). All of their tours are accompanied by an expert tour guide, in our case archaeologist John Shepherd who is an expert in his field and a past Curator of the Museum of London. Although he may not be well known, to give you an idea of the quality of the tour guides, one of them is Classicist Mary Beard, who will be well known at least to those in the UK. In addition we had a tour manager who looked after all of the practical arrangements leaving John free to impart all the information we could want about what we were seeing. There were 21 people in the group which is apparently a little more than they often have but it still worked well and we made some good new friends. It was an intense week, with full days and little time to relax after returning to the hotel before dinner, but well worth it.

While the rest of the group have returned to the UK we got the train up to Rome where we will stay for a few days. After lots of information, food, wine and company last week we are looking forward to relaxing for a few days, although obviously we will be doing a lot of sight-seeing. But tonight it is pouring with rain, we are in the apartment with a drink, a loaf of bread and some good cheese, and have Hawaii Five-O on TV, dubbed into Italian. Oh, and this is the view from the our sixth floor apartment.