Mount Vesuvius Tours and Crater Tickets

Vesuvius is 1,281 metres of volcano standing inside the wreck of an older and larger one, a dozen kilometres from the middle of a metropolitan area of three million people. It has not erupted since March 1944, when lava took the village of San Sebastiano and the ash falling on the plain below wrecked dozens of American bombers parked on the airfields there. The whole mountain became a national park in 1995. What you go up for today is path no. 5, the Gran Cono: four kilometres there and back from San Vito, which the park rates as low difficulty and allows two and a half hours for, walked in the company of one of its own volcanological guides, whose service is inside the ten euro ticket.

This page is about the mountain. The four pages under it are the four ways the market sells it, and they are not variations on one product. A combined Pompeii day runs seven to ten hours and puts several kilometres of Roman paving under your feet. A winery visit is lunch with a view. A crater ticket is a bus and an entrance. The distinction matters because the crater itself is a couple of hours of your life at most. Everything else in a Vesuvius listing is what the operator has attached to it, and that attachment is what you are really choosing between.