On the fourth day it wasn't rainy! In delightful partly-sunny weather we boarded the train for Ercolano, where we planned to ascend Mount Vesuvius by bus and then explore the ruined city of Herculaneum.
Ercolano, it must be said, is a dump. I hope nobody reading this is a proud native of the town, but if you are: your town is a dump. In the parts I visited every vertical surface was covered with grafitti and every horizontal surface was littered with trash.
The company offering bus rides up the mountain has its office just a few meters from the train station, so we bought tickets. The gentleman behind the desk eyed Robert and asked Diane how old he was.
"Nine," she said.
The man looked at her very seriously. "He is eight," he said, and charged us for three tickets rather than four.
Then we boarded the van for the BEST BUS RIDE EVER. I don't think the driver used the brake pedal once during the ascent. We rocketed through Ercolano and up the narrow switchback road ascending the volcano, passing enormous motor coaches, other vans, and cars. We burned rubber on the turns.
And, subtly at first, it began to get . . . cloudy. The top of Vesuvius stuck up into the clouds. The view of Naples got more and more faint, and more and more gray, and eventually vanished altogether. Then the view of the mountainside vanished. And by the time we pulled up in the parking area at the top of the road, just a hundred feet or so below the summit, we were surrounded by fog.
It's also windy on top of a mountain. We pushed on foot along the trail to the crater edge, buffeted by a chilly wind and getting more and more damp from the windblown fog. Everything covered up was fine, but exposed ears and hands got icy cold. But we were there to see Vesuvius, so we soldiered on!
Just below the caldera we caught our breath and warmed up at the ranger station/gift shop. We failed to purchase any of the screamin' demon heads and glitter skulls made of genuine Vesuvius rock. I cannot account for it.
And then, the final attack on the summit! Leaning into the wind, holding our hats on our heads to keep them from being blown into the heart of the volcano, we climbed to the actual rim of the crater and looked down. This is what we saw.
We looked out at the view of Naples and the blue sea beyond. Same thing.
So we ate our sandwiches and went back down the trail (always more difficult than going up). The other people from our van joined us for a second BEST BUS RIDE EVER back down Vesuvius. Most notable moment: when the driver saw a traffic jam ahead where two giant motor coaches were trying to get past each other on a hairpin bend, and he promptly accelerated toward the congestion.
At last we arrived back in Ercolano, and walked through the grubby streets to the ruins of Herculaneum.
All of us agree that Herculaneum was the high point of the trip. The buildings are more intact than those at Pompeii, and the excavations are newer so they've been done with a bit more archaeological precision. The result is that you can actually see what some of these rooms and buildings must have looked like before the eruption. In a few places there are intact roofs and upper stories.
So what did a Roman town look like? Well, kind of like a town in Italy. The streets of Herculaneum must have been much like the streets of Sorrento. Stucco-covered brick buildings with upstairs balconies and tile roofs, awnings, cobblestone streets, courtyards, even grafitti. There was probably just as much litter and dog crap as in modern Ercolano, but the excavations cleared that away.
That's one thing about studying the Romans which is quite humbling. They solved most of the problems of urban domestic architecture two millennia ago. Since then we've either been fiddling with the details or comng up with innovations which aren't as good. I'm not talking about materials, or systems like air conditioning. I mean the arrangement of rooms in the house and houses on the street. The difference between a Roman town house in Herculaneum and a house in the French Quarter of New Orleans is chiefly that the upstairs galleries are cast iron in Louisiana, whereas the Romans would have used wood.
Architecture, at least in its domestic form, is one of the arts for which one can make the case that it's finished. Problem solved. The ancients did most of it, and what they didn't solve the designers of the Georgian period did. The only problems left are engineering rather than aesthetic.
We spent the whole afternoon tramping about Herculaneum, and I believe we saw everything. After a break for oranges, we hiked up the hill to the train station, and waited for our train while a drunkenly amiable Hungarian man tried to make conversation.
From Ercolano we rode to Torre Annunziata (a very slightly less grubby town near Pompeii), and got to the gates of the Villa Poppaea just as they were closing. We only had about an hour to see the site, which wasn't really long enough. The Villa belonged to Nero's sister, and only a small part of the complex has been excavated. Where Herculaneum and Pompeii are urban, the Villa is a vast country house, the center of a great agricultural estate. Roman landowners sometimes boasted that all their needs could be supplied from their own lands, and would host dinner-parties at which all the food, wine, and even the linens were produced on-site.
After such a long day of walking, climbing, walking, and more walking, we returned to Sorrento hungry. No pizza or sandwiches this time! We headed for the snazziest restaurant we could find: Re Foods Restaurant, on the Via Accademia. We sipped spumante while choosing our meal. I had a pasta dish with fish, followed by a veal chop, accompanied by a very nice wine, a "rubrato" San Gregorio from Campania. That's one I'm going to look for in the wine shops.
The stroll back to our flat included the inevitable stop for gelato, and then all of us tumbled into bed after the best day of the trip so far.
(Photo credit: Emily Cambias. All rights reserved.)
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