Friday 14 June

Packing up and reorganising our ‘stuff’ took up some of a hot and sticky morning – and I’m still very impressed with our use of packing cubes, bought at Briscoes ‘sale’ price a few days before we left home.    Things are much more easily found and the bags look really tidy.  Pete on the other hand was doing the outside tidying and mowing the lawns again so he was happy; hot weather and a couple of overnight showers make the grass grow like mad.   Justyna made another of her delicious lunches, this time vegetable soup and spaghetti bolognese.  We were able to give Patryk a big hug goodbye when Andy took us to the airport but Ellie was at her grandparents’ place after kindy, but we’ll see them in Croatia in two weeks.  And there was the power station still smoking beside the expressway as we left.

Our flight from Krakow to Naples was delayed by 30 minutes, then a really long wait for the bags, and we were met by Massimo from the hotel – taxi price and it meant we didn’t have to find our way to a fairly anonymous Domus Deorum which is a B&B hotel near the railway station     https://domus-deorum-deluxe.hotel-naples.com/en/#photo.

 Owner Angela couldn’t have been more welcoming, we were given a choice of prosecco or red wine (of course it had to be bubbles for the start of the Italian adventure), there were chocolates waiting in our small, but very comfortable, room.   What’s not to like?

Saturday 15 June

And then there was breakfast…. the photos pretty much say it all, and we tried hard but couldn’t eat everything. 

This morning’s destination was the Archeological Museum which houses collections of items taken from Pompeii and Herculaneum but first we had to negotiate the train station.  Went to the ticket office:

So we found the tobacconist, got the Metro ticket followed the signs to Line 2 then they disappeared so getting to the correct platform took a while and it’s a huge station.   At the other end we had a bit of a walk in the heat, 30+ degrees at 11am and very humid, and found the museum by which time I was pretty much over it.   There were no English maps (being reprinted), the only guide being available by QR code scanner – and even though I connected to the museum internet the scanner didn’t work.  So we went into it a bit blind.

Downstairs is full of gallery after gallery of statues which lose their appeal after a while though I did rather like Emperor Vespasian who seemed to have a ‘What on earth are they doing now?’ look on his face (I remember him from the ‘Falco’ series of books by Lindsey Davies, Falco is a Roman detective, a good read too), and another fellow who just looked wistful, so they definitely weren’t ‘stony faced’.  There were two statues made of really ugly splodgy brown and white marble, yuck. 

Upstairs we found more statues – and I couldn’t resist ‘Pan and the Goat’ but took it from a fairly delicate angle so make of it what you will.   The view from the windows down to a cool-looking garden doesn’t show the heat inside the building and out but it was good to stand in a bit of a breeze as we went around.      The galleries here have smaller treasures unearthed over the years as well as frescoes removed intact from the walls of houses in both towns, and how they did that 200 years ago without today’s tools is a miracle.    You could see that they weren’t just flat paint either, some had raised figures or patterns on the plaster.   My favourite (and one of Pompeii’s iconic frescoes) is that of the baker Terentius Neo and his wife; it’s amazing that they could be positively identified for a start, and you can see they are ‘people of means, cultured and fashionable’ according to the blurb, and ‘their facial features … betray their provincial origin (they were probably from Samnium), this clashes somewhat with the cultural tone that their gestures and attributes establish’.   Snobby writer.  I found today’s cat which is about 3cm wide, a beautifully carved lion made from an agate cameo; and loved the blue and yellow multi-coloured bowl.   

So much to see and my brain was majorly fried by the time we left at 12.45.   We ended up on different Metro line but got to the main station eventually, managed to buy tickets to Ercolano on a local train.  You could see the humidity in the air, it was so hot.  We could see Vesuvius out the windows.   Pete was offered a seat a couple of times so he may have been looking his almost-65 years? And musicians got on after a couple of stops so we were serenaded (Funiculi Funicu-laaaaaa on a piano accordion) for a while before they passed through with a hat looking for donations.    BUT then we overshot the station by overthinking it so ended up getting off and taking a taxi back to the Herculaneum ticket office to pick up our two-hour tour of the ruins, guided by an archaeologist.  The taxi driver told us ‘my name is Enzo, like Enzo Ferrari, I will get you to Ercolano quickly’. 

This tour was one of the best we’ve done anywhere, Dr Luciano loved his work, was keen to share it with our small group of four (a young Portuguese ophthalmologist and her German partner), kept apologising for his poor English (it was fine) and then we’d hear ‘Come this way, there is a special surprise’ and there would be a lovely fresco in the next building, or a 2000-year-old mosaic that we could walk on just as if it was a piece of ordinary concrete.     Its hard to believe the floors are not covered but Luciano said the glass breaks or gets condensation and it just doesn’t work.  They know a lot about the scope and immediate effects of the eruption because a man called Pliny the younger was able to document what he saw at the time.   

The women’s bath house intrigued me, four intact rooms and they didn’t have a cold bath because it was said to affect fertility (though other towns had cold baths for women).  The roof of the ‘gossip room’ was corrugated so condensation wouldn’t drop on people, and it had a perfectly intact floor with dolphins and other fishy creatures.   The next room had a mosaic with squares of black and white showing a checkerboard, urn, spoon, and a swastika-like emblem.   We could see where the heating system had been too.  And the wine shop had shaped shelves for the amphora, but a bit bigger than our similar-shaped wine storage these days.

About ten years ago David Packard, of Hewlett Packard, bankrolled some of the diggings and a new footbridge to get across to the site so there has been a lot done thanks to him.   We had been to Pompeii 13 years ago and it’s a huge site; Herculaneum (named after Hercules, who is depicted in an impressive intact fresco with his red lion skin) is small and easy to navigate.  It was a wealthy town with a lot of fine marble from all around Italy used in the houses, from benchtops in the cafes to specks of white marble ‘cats eyes’ in paths which would reflect in the moonlight.     Pompeii’s streets have stepping stones to get across the raw sewage running down the streets; Herculaneum had its own sewer system and water supply to the houses, it was on a natural slope so easy to get water to and drain sewage away so no mucky streets. 

The town was on the seashore, now a few hundred meters away, and in the 79AD eruption of Vesuvius was covered, floor up, by 20 meters of pyroclastic mud which seeped into the houses, carbonised items (including a large wooden door and several beds), preserved much of the town.   There was ash but lava didn’t flow over until 25 days later.  People would have died almost instantly through lack of air (a bit like an atom bomb) and their skin was burnt but skeletons remained and around 400 have been discovered.   One skeleton is called ‘the woman with gold bracelets’ and I think near her they also found an actual combination lock.

 The most recent main discovery was at sea level when they were drilling down and ‘broke’ a boat which they found was at the sea level of that time (its now in its own display area, almost intact), then further digging found large arched ‘rooms’ which would have been used by fishermen etc, and inside were groups of skeletons huddled together probably waiting to escape.  A very moving sight. DNA analysis shows that some were members of the same family.  Luciano pointed out one skeleton with perfect teeth – he says its because they had a diet which included a lot of anchovies and they apparently are good for teeth.  We also saw, in another part, a carbonised loaf of bread which was found underneath a skeleton of a boy aged about 8 or 9, huddled over the bread as if to protect it.

We’d definitely recommend this tour to anyone – easier than Pompeii, small group and so full of information but in a good way, not a lecture.

We got the train back to Naples then had pizza just around the corner from our hotel, not far from the Porta Capuana, a city gate from ? 14^th century – rebuilding something there but leaving the gate intact.   It had been free-standing since the 15^th century when the city walls were razed.  

We were given Limoncello and almond cookies when we got back to our room, a very kind thought by Angela.