2 Best Sights in The Bay of Naples, Italy

From the small modern-day port of Baia you can board Cymba, a boat with glass panels on its lower deck and view part of the città sommersa, the underwater city of ancient Baia. The guided tour—usually in Italian, but given in English if arranged well in advance—lasts about 75 minutes and is best undertaken in calm conditions, when you can get good glimpses of Roman columns, roads, villa walls, and mosaics. Peer through fish-flecked plexiglass at statues of Octavia Claudia (Claudius's sister) and of Ulysses, his outstretched arms and mollusk-eaten head once a part of the nymphaeum since sunk into the deeps after an outbreak of bradyseism. (Note that these statues are actually replicas. The originals are up the hill in the Castle museum.)

With dazzling "virtual" versions of Herculaneum's streets and squares and a multidimensional simulation of Vesuvius erupting, Herculaneum's 1st-century-meets-the-21st-century museum is a must for kids and adults alike. After stopping at the ticket office you descend, as in an excavation, to a floor below. You'll experience Herculaneum's Villa dei Papiri before and (even more dramatically) during the eruption, courtesy of special effects: enter "the burning cloud" of AD 79; then emerge, virtually speaking, inside Pompeii's House of the Faun, which can be seen both as it is and as it was for two centuries BC. The next re-creation is again Villa dei Papiri. Then comes a stellar pre- and postflooding view of Baia's Nymphaeum, the now-displaced statues arrayed as they were in the days of Emperor Claudius, who commissioned them.

Visitors here are invited to take a front-row seat for "Day and Night in the Forum of Pompeii," with soldiers, litter-bearing slaves, and toga-clad figures moving spectrally to complete the spell; or to make a vicarious visit to the Lupanari brothels, their various pleasures illustrated in graphic virtual frescoes along the walls. A wooden model of Herculaneum's theater, its virtual re-creation, reminds us that it was here that a local farmer, while digging a well, first came across what proved to be not merely a single building, but a whole town. Equally fascinating are the virtual baths. There's also a 3D film of Vesuvius erupting, replete with a fatalistic narrative and cataclysmic special effects: the words of Pliny the Younger provide a timeless commentary while the floor vibrates under your feet.