If you are in Rome, Naples and Sorrento and has only time to visit one of the two ancient cities affected by Mount Vesuvius pick Pompeii!

Both of the ancient cities are accessible by a local train from Naples and Sorrento . Pompeii is right off the train station and for Herculaneum you have to walk for about 10 minutes from the train station. You can find the details about local train in this post .

Pompeii is a much bigger city and is better preserved . You need between half a day to a full day to see it properly.

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Herculaneum is much smaller and both cities are very similar given they existed around the same time .

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If you don’t have a lot of time you won’t miss much by not visiting Herculaneum since it is very similar to Pompeii.

We visited Pompeii and went up to the entrance of Herculaneum. You can see the town from the entrance . Since it looked very much like Pompeii we didn’t go inside .

We went back to Naples to get some Pizza before leaving for Florence.