Our Visit to Paestum

In the morning, after a breakfast cannoli, we headed out to Paestum, ruins of an ancient Greek city that dates back to 600B.C. The location is my “happy place,” where my life-long love of history and my passion for working with models culminated in one perfect day back in 2013.

My mom felt self-conscious walking with her newly-acquired cane, refusing to accept the diagnosis from years ago of just how bad her vision had truly become. Still, she was determined to walk the complicated maze of cobble stones to visit the acclaimed Paestum temples. Though the ground wasn’t nearly as fraught with danger and exhausting as Pompeii had been the day before, the temperature was a few degrees hotter. It was exactly midday and the heat was stifling and almost unbearable. Still, my mom soldiered on while my Aunt Cathy and I led her through the park.

Unlike during my visit in 2013, the public now is allowed to climb on and enter the temples of both Neptune and Hera, though the steps that lead higher and higher to the main center of each building were several feet tall. I doubted my ability to climb them, let alone my mom. But through determination, patience, and shear stubbornness, she managed to make it all the way to the center of the building, some 20 feet in the air. I was so incredibly surprised and proud of her, especially based on not only her vision but all her other medical ailments. She was a real trooper.

My aunt Cathy was mostly silent, soaking it all up, smiling like a little girl, and like the rest of us, were trying not to drink her weight in water on the blistering hot day. Once we had climbed down, we decided to take a full walk around the rest of the city, that essentially covers two football fields. We stopped at the amphitheater, saw the Temple of Athena from a short distance away, and finally walked through the residential area on the highly uneven cobblestone path, with each stone at least 2-3ft in diameter.

We ended this little visit with some well-needed bathroom breaks and a few nice minutes sitting in the shade of the overly priced veranda restaurant where we bought cold water, cold sodas, some chips, and some pastries that were more exotic to our American eyes.

Once again, thank you for contributing to make this trip possible and thank you also for reading along with our journey! It means so much, there are no words to fully convey how special this trip has been so far, and we’re only been gone a few days in!