Pompeii, May 5 – This year’s sound-and-light tours at Pompeii promise to be the most spectacular yet, organisers said Wednesday.
“There’ll be completely new content and effects,” said the head of the Naples Tourist Board, Dario Scalabrini.
“The show will be even more atmospheric, with a great potential for attracting all kinds of visitors,” he said.
Among the novelties of the night-time event, which has been dubbed Pompeii Moons, will be a visit to the so-called Fugitives Orchard where the most famous plaster casts of people vainly fleeing volcanic ash were made.
Visitors will also enjoy a new computer recreation of the ancient city and meet “a curious character, voiced by actor Luca Ward, who will accompany tourists on their special journey,” Scalabrini said. Pompeii Moons runs from the upcoming weekend, May 7-9, until the last weekend in October, he said.
The shows, Italy’s first-ever ‘son-et-lumiere’ tours, kicked off to immediate acclaim in 2002 and have proved a big hit ever since.
The one-hour tours in Italian, English and Japanese have a special soundtrack synchronised with the light show and mingling ambient noise with a narrative voice illustrating the various highlights.
B&B Pompeii The Fauno is just 1 km from Pompeii Ruins, you can easily reach by car (5 minutes) or train of Circumvesuviana ( 500 mt . from the B&B) .
They climax in the Forum with a dramatic video re-enactment of the catastrophic eruption that buried the city in 79 AD.
Unlike other son-et-lumiere tours in Italy and abroad, the initiative offers visitors not just a simple show but a stroll through the digs that reveals an ”unusual, poetic side” of the ancient city, organisers say.
The tour kicks off at the Terme Suburbane, a once-neglected district that has become a big draw for its frescoes graphically depicting a variety of sex acts – presumed to be an illustration of the services on offer at the local brothel.
It then winds its way up the main road, pointing out the curious cart ruts, craftsmen’s shops and famous villas.
The grand finale comes in the heart of the old city, the forum, when four giant projectors beam a special- effects-laden video reconstruction of the wrath of the volcano Vesuvius, which smothered the city and its lesser-known but equally fascinating neighbour Herculaneum in ash and cinders.