Category: Pompeii

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Pompeii & Herculaneum

As promised in the previous Blog post, with its overview of my recent trip to Naples, I now bring you a post that concentrates entirely on Pompeii and Herculaneum, both of which I visited from Naples as day excursions during that recent trip.

Both places were wealthy ancient Roman cities that were destroyed in a catastrophic two-day eruption of nearby Mount Vesuvius in (probably) October 79 CE. The first phase of the eruption produced a gigantic column of pumice and volcanic ash, which, when it collapsed, began to rain down volcanic material mainly over Pompeii, whereas

1 February 2026 No Comments

Back from Naples

I’ve meanwhile returned from my eight-day trip to Naples, Italy, which I also used as a base for excursions to Pompeii and Herculaneum. As before I’ll provide a brief first overview and photo essay with shots taken by smartphone, while the photos taken with my proper dSLR camera still await processing. But the smartphone images are good enough for this purpose of a quick overview.

As a first image, here’s a panoramic shot of the city taken from a hilltop terrace next to Castel Sant’ Elmo – with Mount Vesuvius looming large in the background

18 January 2026 No Comments

Islands of Dark Tourism

In this post I want to take you off the beaten track and to some less well explored, more exotic, remote locations. The eight selected places have only one thing in common: they are all islands. Other than that they are very different from each other and represent a range of distinct categories of dark tourism that dark globe trotters visit for very different reasons.

Of course there are well-known dark islands, too, such as Alcatraz or Robben Island, both former prison islands turned memorials, which today attract large numbers of visitors and hence overlap with mainstream tourism; but here we are going to get further away from that.

29 June 2022 3 Comments