why you need to specified the public segment in your url??

no idea, it only works when I do that. When I do just sitename.localhost.com it just gives me the directory listing (/app, /public, etc.)

seems like an apache misconfiguration

try setting a virtual host like this in your httpd.conf file, go to the wamp server icon, it's located in the task bar, left click, go to Apache -> httpd.conf, paste this snippet at the end of the file

Listen 3030
<VirtualHost *:3030>
    ServerName www.example.org
    DocumentRoot "C:\write here the path where laravel is located\public"

  <Directory "C:\write here the path where laravel is located\public">
        Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
  </Directory>

</VirtualHost>

reset wamp server, now go to http://localhost:3030 and you're done