Ali– On Monday we said goodbye to Sorento, hopping back on the Circumvesuviana towards Pompeii. Disembarking, we followed the tourists into the station. We had all our luggage with us and were expressing a desire to ditch the bags somewhere when a naked guy with winged shoes, a winged hat and a caduceus appeared and escorted us to a luggage check counter. It was, of course, Mercury, the god of travellers who had heard our prayers. Incidentally Mercury is also the god of liars.
Having ditched our luggage we stumbled around trying to get our bearings and noted a sign for Pompeii tours. Given that we had about 3 hours to see Pompeii before we were due on a train to Rome, we sprang for the full, skip-the-line guided tour. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The skip-the- line deals are money well spent for a tourist with limited time or patience. Following our guide, we marched past what the tour sales lady had called ‘quite a long line today’, which looked like a line at the only open gelato vendor in August.
Once inside, we were treated to an excellent walk back in time. Pompeii was buried under so much ash and dirt that all inorganic matter was well preserved from ancient marauding bands of looters. Only the modern maurading bands of looters have done damage, and that was mostly in the form of hauling off all the marble for repurposing.
We learned some fascinating things, like the fact that the Pompeiians created little raised stepping stone street crossing areas to both keep feet above the rivers of poo (Roman sewers never made it to Pompeii) and force travelers to hire local hackneys whose custom width could drive between stones. 
Also the things that looked like a bunch of toilets in a very friendly bathroom are in fact places for heated clay jars to keep food warm for customers coming for an afternoon snack. 
Lastly a Lupanare is not a place where they store the wolves. It’s errrr…. a place where ….. well so …. I’ll just post the pictures and you can figure it out. There was a convenient “menu” of sorts, as customers often spoke a variety of languages. There were also distinctive signs that helped point interested folk in the right direction.
It’s odd but the Lupanare had the biggest line of tourists waiting to check out the artifacts.
The last thing you see on the tour are the famous casts of those that died. They were killed quickly by the gases coming off of the hot ash and then buried under more ash. All the organic matter decomposed but the cavity where the body had lain remained. A very morbidly ingenious archeologist decided to inject plastic into the ash during excavation and uncovered the worst selling Barbie dolls ever. 
With that, we decided to hightail it back to the train. Vesuvius is still active and our guide said the last eruption was way back in 1941. So she’s due to blow and I really didn’t want to be a gruesome Barbie in 2000 years.