Christine

I'm planning on visiting Pompeii and Herculaneum in one day on a 5-day trip to Sorrento and Rome. How long should I plan at each site to get a decent overview of each?

Patrick

Don't know that this will answer your question, but we arrived at Pompeii when it opened in the morning, thinking we'd go on to Herculaneum in the afternoon. We never made it to Herc., left Pompeii at about 5 PM having become totally immersed it the whole place. If you just want to see what the place looks like and walk down a main street and the forum so you can see you've been there, I suppose you could whip through Pompeii in about an hour, but you won't have absorbed the fascinating daily life stories and atmosphere of the place. By the way, we bought a very good guide book and did it on our own, but you can get a guide at the gate for a one hour or so tour of the highlights.

Carey

Christine, <BR> <BR>My husband and I went through Pompeii rather quickly and it took us 4 1/2 hours. You can easily spend all day there and not see everything. I would recommend finding a tour group to join. Every significant area of the site we went to , we were bulldozed over by tour groups, who let all the people of there group in before they let other people. It is really nutty! If you do it independently, just go the opposite way of the tour groups and do your own exploring. By a book that has all the major sites in it.

Howard

If you want to do both in one day, it is possible. I don't think either site opens too early, but if you start at 10 AM, spend 2 hours at Herc., an hour in-between sites, and 4 hours at Pompeii, you would be finished by 5 PM. While not giving you extensive time, you probably would match if not surpass the average time spent at either spot. <BR> <BR>I went to the two sites on different days, but probably spent about a total of 6 or 7 hours at the two places. I combined Herc. with a trip to the top of Mt. Vesuvius. Getting to and from Pompeii and the visit took up the bulk of the day from my base in Naples - I spent the rest of the day jsut walking around Naples. No reason you could not do both the same day. <BR> <BR>Howard

Sandy

I agree w/Howard, you can do both in one day. A friend and I went to Pompeii early, found two couples to share a guide with us, went opposite direction of the big tour groups, and saw all the highlights in about 3 hours. Then we walked around by ourselves for a hour or two, had a late lunch, and hopped on the circumvesuviana to Herculaneum (the stop says Erco or something and we missed the stop, went into Naples and the kind conductor let us back on for free). <BR> <BR>We ended up at Herculaneum late, were the only two tourists there, hired a guide (very cheap), and spent about 2 hrs there. It's different from Pompeii, you can really see how the people lived, please don't skip it, it was great! <BR> <BR>Sandy

Thyra

Christine, I am not sure if you could see both in one day, we spent a day in Pompeii and as a previous poster mentioned, did not see it all by a long shot. I just wanted to make the suggestion that you hire a private guide. We did this and it was fantastic, our guide was able to point out things that other people were missing, he told lots of wonderful anecdotes and really made Pompeii come alive! There are licensed guides near the gates and they charge a set fee, if you can get another couple, or two to go in on it with you it will be less expensive. The day we went, we bit the bullet and paid the entire fee, but it would have been worth it at double the price.