April 20, 2021

Tour Guide For Pompeii. Yay or Nay?

THIS POST: will explore the pros and cons of getting a tour guide for Pompeii vs doing a self-guided tour/wandering around aimlessly with no clue what the devil is going on.

Top Tips!

Wear trainers, bring a rainjacket, sunnies, water, suncream, the usual suspects
Note: only small umbrellas are allowed into Pompeii (unless, apparently you’re a tour guide and use it to point at things)
Make sure you turn up early for your tour, if you book one

Preparing to Visit Pompeii

Well, it seems there are two main choices people make when visiting Pompeii. Choose to go it alone or get a pro to guide you round.

At first when we started researching, we were of the mind “why pay when you can just walk around on your own…you will see the same stuff right?” In short, yes but you will have very little to no context behind what you are seeing.

You may be advised to wear suitable shoes such as trainers. For some unknown reason to us all, we turned up in sandals. No idea why. It wasn’t actually that bad. However, there are a number of uphill/very unlevel streets so ideally don’t do what we did.

Also bring a rainjacket, water, sunnies, suncream, you know the usual stuff. There is very little shelter in Pompeii. If it’s very hot or rainy, you will feel the wrath of the open Italian skies. For most of our tour, we were lucky and the weather was ok.

Towards the end, it turned into a torrential downpour. By God, witnessing an angry storm when in Pompeii feels somewhat evocative and scary, as if Mother Nature is reminding you of her power to end things all over again. God knows what the people who lived here must have felt when Vesuvius lit up the sky.

Choosing A Tour Guide For Pompeii

After speaking with a friend who had done a private guided tour and raved about it, we opted to go for a guided tour although not a private one!

After researching some of the smaller group tours ( we didn’t want to be wandering around with 50 other people) and taking price into account (we’re not rolling in dollar dollar bill yo) we settled on Askos Tours.

Askos Tours offer a ‘small group tour with an Archaeologist’. They usually run in the morning and the afternoon in a variety of languages. We paid £42 each at the very end of September 2020. Their reviews on Tripadvisor at the time of booking were very good.

Other pros: You could cancel 24hrs in advance and get a full refund. We visited during Covid times and so a solid cancellation policy (on EVERYTHING) was very important to us.

Getting To Pompeii

From Naples: take the Circumvesuviana train leaving for Sorrento or vice versa (40 mins trip), and stop in Pompei Scavi – Villa dei Misteri. The entrance is just a few steps away.

From Salerno: Take a Trenitalia train to the station of Pompei; to reach the meeting place you’ll need to walk 30 minutes or get a taxi (5-10 minutes ride).

From Rome: Take a high speed Frecciarossa train to Napoli Centrale (1 hour trip), and then a Circumvesuviana train in the direction of Sorrento, stopping at Pompei Scavi.

If using public transport, I suggest you arrange your journey to get into Pompeii long before you tour is due to start.

If you are staying in Pompeii, we simply walked to the ruins. It was a great way to see more of beautiful Pompeii and from our hotel (Hotel Forum) the walk was around 15/20 mins.

The Big Question..Should you Get A Guide For Pompeii Or Not?

Yes, you should get a tour guide for Pompeii. Had we opted for walking around without a guide, I have to say, alot of the gravity and stories of Pompeii would have been lost on us. It’s one thing to walk around and look at ruins. However, it is another thing entirely to understand the people and history behind the ruins.

Sure, you get given a map when you enter Pompeii. But let’s be honest, how many of us actually bother to read all the information on the leaflets we’re given? It’s a boring way of learning historical information. The guide will bring Pompeii to life for you.

With Askos tours you also got a set of headphones and the guide was wearing a microphone. So even if you weren’t standing near him, you could still hear what he was saying.

There were around 15-20 people on the tour, I would say. The tour lasted around 2 hours and then the guide left you to explore at your own leisure.

This is nice as you can then spend some extra time seeing certain places you liked or places you didn’t get to visit during the tour.

The only slight downside with the guided tour is that you cant spend loads of time in a particular place as the group needs to move on. The speed of the tour felt about right in general, just remember the places you’d like to go back and see again afterwards, if there are any.

So all in all, I would highly recommend getting a guided tour for Pompeii. I can also recommend Askos Tours in particular. We ended up being really happy with our decision. I hope you will be too!