Are you sitting down? Yes? Okay good, because we are about to burst a travel bubble: Pompeii isn't all that great. If you're still planning on making an Italian pilgrimage this spring or summer and want to get the usual ration of ancient ruins, then please let us suggest taking a day trip to the less crowded but no less impressive Ostia Antica, the old port city for Rome.
Only some twenty miles outside of downtown Rome and accessible by extra-urban train lines (yay, no bus tours!), Ostia Antica is a playground of multi-story Roman ruins just waiting for you to run amok down its cobblestone streets and in its amphitheaters—after paying the €6.50 entrance fee, of course. Like Pompeii, the place is an active archaeological site packed with mosaics and frescos. Unlike Pompeii, Ostia wasn't destroyed by a flippin' volcano, meaning that most of the city is as intact as possible for a place that's been booming since the 3rd century BC. ]]>