On This Day – The Roman City of Herculaneum

While the current travel restrictions are in place I have no new stories to post so what I thought that I would do is to go through my picture archives and see where I was on this day at any time in the last few travelling years.

On 21st April 2018 I was in Naples and took a train ride out to the archaeological site of Herculaneum.

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Entrance Tickets – Castel St’Elmo in Naples

Admission to the once mighty fortress was free (which is always a bonus) so we climbed to the top and enjoyed views of Vesuvius on one side and the waterfront of Naples on the other.  On the down side we had to pay to go inside the Museum.  Let me say however , no one should miss visiting Naples, it was once part of the Grand Tour of Europe and surely it should be again.  Just my opinion.

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Naples, The Bay and the Castles

“Rome is stately and impressive; Florence is all beauty and enchantment; Genoa is picturesque; Venice is a dream city; but Naples is simply fascinating”.– Lilian Whiting

On the way back to Ercolano railway station we had a little bit of a misunderstanding about coffee and cake.   Kim wanted coffee and cake and spotted a café and I rejected it because it was on the shady side of the street confidently predicting that there was sure there would be another one further along in the sun.  As it turned out there wasn’t so we stopped instead at a bar with a pushy waitress and had an alternative beer.  We should have been eating gooey cake but I was in a sticky situation!

The train ride back to Naples was less crowded and a little more comfortable than the outward journey and thirty minutes or so later we arrived at the railway terminus and our plan now was to walk directly to the harbour and the sea of the Bay of Naples.

The direct route was along the arterial Corso Umberto I (an unfortunate king who was assassinated in 1900) and brought us to a magnificent statue of King Victor Emanuel II, his father and the first King of United Italy in 1861.  This was not a pleasant walk I have to say, too much growling traffic and a rather featureless route, I preferred the noisy and chaotic back streets.

We reached the sea at the Castel Nuevo and the Palazza Reale, once a royal palace but now a museum and an opera house.  We originally planned to go further but we now agreed that after a long day this was rather ambitious so we turned our backs on the seafront and made our way back to the accommodation passing again through the crumbling architecture of the back streets.

I had a mind to visit an underground exhibition of a subterranean archaeological project called ‘Underground Naples’ but Kim wondered why we might go underground to look at Roman houses when only this morning we had seen them on the surface on in the sunshine.  I had to agree with her logic so we went for a drink at a pavement bar instead before going back for a short rest and preparation for evening meal.

There was no debate to be had about this and we returned to the pizzeria that we had enjoyed last night but this time we had double helpings of the buffalo mozzarella starter and we shared a pizza with a house red in a cracked pot to compliment it.

The following morning our plan was to finish what we started yesterday and make the long walk to the seafront and we set off soon after breakfast and after only thirty minutes arrived at Piazza del Plebiscito (the header picture) an elegant square first commissioned in the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte but famous most of all because in a public vote in 1860 this is where the Kingdom of Naples agreed to become part of United Italy.  a sort of reverse Brexit as it were!

As we walked north along the side of the Bay we knew that we were in an altogether different area of Naples, no grime here, just swanky yachts to our left and grand expensive hotels to our right.  I recall reading once, some time ago, that the Bay of Naples was the most horribly polluted part of the Mediterranean Sea but someone has been clearing it up and not any more it isn’t.  The water was crystal clear and people were swimming in the sea and fishermen and a procession of boats were making their way to the shell fish harvesting areas.

At the Castel dell’Ovo admission to the once mighty fortress was free (which is always a bonus) so we climbed to the top and enjoyed views of Vesuvius on one side and the waterfront of Naples on the other.  Let me say, no one should miss visiting Naples, it was once part of the Grand Tour of Europe and surely it should be again.  Just my opinion.

It was busy today so after the castle we strayed back inland back towards Piazza del Plebiscito where it was time for a drinks break and this is where we suffered the indignity of being thrown out of a restaurant.

It advertised bargain price beer and wine and as we examined the menu a waiter gathered us up like a shepherd and insisted that we go inside.  He showed us to a table and provided us with menus.  We told him that we only wanted a drink and this tipped him over the edge.  His eyes began to swivel, his arms began to flay and he lost all sense of volume control.  This is not a bar it is a restaurant, he yelled, withdrew the menus, dragged us out of our seats, pushed us towards the door and slammed it shut behind us with a resounding crash that almost took it off its hinges.  I looked back, the staff were sniggering, they thought it was amusing so I gave them a sarcastic smile and a tossed them a dismissive wave to tell them that so did I.

I haven’t been thrown out of a restaurant since 2004 in the Old Town in Prague for exactly the same reason.

Opposite was a pavement bar which also suggested cheap drink prices so we stopped there instead but when I called for the bill it seems the drinks that we had ordered were not included in the offer.  I wasn’t going to argue, I should have read the small print – another travel lesson learned!

Naples, The Roman City of Herculaneum

“At every ticket window customers were gesticulating wildly.  They didn’t seem to be so much buying tickets as pouring out their troubles to the… weary looking men seated behind each window.  It is amazing how much emotion the Italians invest in even the simplest transaction”  –  Bill Bryson – ‘Neither here Nor there’

The Circumvesuviana is an electrified narrow-gauge railway that runs from Naples to Sorrento and we enjoyed a cramped but scenic journey as the line passed through many tunnels and over several bridges.  I first used it in 2004 and from memory it was clean and efficient but now it is gloriously chaotic, battle scarred and overcrowded with danger seeping out of every corner.

After half an hour we arrived at the station of Ercolani Scavi, which is barely half a mile away from the entrance to the excavations.

You have to hand it to the Romans, they thought of everything, even down to building this great city so close to a convenient railway line.  Compare this to the French, for example, Calais station, if you have ever been there, is miles out away from the town!

For those short of time, Herculaneum is a good alternative visitor site to the more famous Pompeii.  After the eruption the town was buried under approximately twenty metres of lava, mud and ash and it lay hidden and almost intact until it was accidentally discovered by some workers digging a well in 1709 who dropped into an underground Roman Theatre.  After a bit of inevitable plundering the excavation process began soon after but is still incomplete and today the untidy Italian towns of Ercolano and Portici lie on the approximate site of old Herculaneum which prevents its complete excavation because you can’t just knock down a living town just to get to Ancient Rome.

Actually the excavation has now been indefinitely suspended to help preserve the ancient city.  The volcanic water, ash and debris covering Herculaneum, along with the extreme heat, left it in a remarkable state of good preservation but once excavations began exposure to the elements began the rapid process of deterioration. This was not helped by previous methods of archaeology used earlier in the town’s excavation, sometimes rather crude which generally prioritised recovering valuable artifacts rather than ensuring the safeguarding of the infrastructure.

Tourism, vandalism as well as inappropriate excavation methods has damaged many of the areas open to the public, and water damage coming from modern Ercolano has undermined many of the foundations of the structures. Consequently the archeologists have decided that what remains buried is best left buried until it can be excavated safely.

So long as Vesuvius doesn’t erupt again these archeological  endeavours can wait.  No one knows absolutely for sure but it is estimated that visitors can only see only about a fifth of the city which led me to speculate on what great treasures there must be waiting to be discovered in what remains perfectly preserved underneath the foundations of the modern town directly above.

I had been to Herculaneum once before in 2004 with my son, Jonathan, this is him at an ancient fast food restaurant…

I tried to recapture the cool pose fourteen years later…

… and failed miserably on account of not having a hat.

From the entrance we had to descend into what resembles a deep quarry through the twenty metres or so of tufa and down to the site itself and it became immediately apparent that Herculaneum is most unlike the remains at the site at Pompeii.

Pompeii was destroyed and the citizens were killed by fumes and ash that were carried by the wind in a south-easterly direction from the volcano but Herculaneum was on the other side of the mountain to the west.  During the night, the column of volcanic debris which had risen into the stratosphere began falling back down onto Vesuvius.  A pyroclastic flow formed that sent a mixture of gas, ash, and rock that had reached a temperature of five hundred degrees centigrade racing down toward Herculaneum at a rate of sixty miles an hour.  No chance to outrun it, a Roman chariot could only achieve speeds of half that and only over a short distance. When the flow reached the city it buried the citizens who had fled to boat houses and were trying to escape to open sea and the intense heat killed them in an instant.

This is the scientific bit.  A pyroclastic flow is a ground-hugging avalanche of hot ash, pumice, rock fragments, and volcanic gas that rushes down the side of a volcano and the temperature within a flow may be so great that it is sufficient to burn and carbonise wood immediately upon impact. Once deposited, because of the intense heat, the ash, pumice, and rock fragments deform and weld together.  Although it killed all of the inhabitants this flow did little damage to the structures, instead slowly filling them from the bottom up and preserving them perfectly without destroying them altogether.

This process of filling from the bottom in this way was important because at Pompeii most of the buildings were destroyed by the overhead weight of the ash  and they inevitably collapsed but this didn’t happen at Herculaneum.  Good for us visitors two thousand years later but not so good for those living there at the time.

The excavation site is much smaller than Pompeii but because of the state of preservation of the buildings I found it to be more interesting.  The buildings are intact and the frescoes and the wall paintings are much more vivid and it is possible to visit the houses of important people (including Julius Ceaser’s father-in-law) and the shopping areas and public buildings and the boat houses where most of the inhabitants died as they tried to make their impossible escape from the approaching boiling lava flow.

Whereas Pompeii takes a full day to explore, Herculanem takes just a couple of hours so after we had walked the ancient streets we left and ran the gauntlet of the restaurants and bars with pushy waiters back to the railway station and a return to Naples.

Herculaneum also reveals that things don’t really change so much, this is a sign on a wall setting out prices two thousand years ago…

… and this is a modern day fast food shop in the city of Naples…

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Related Articles:

Spartacus the Gladiator

Rome

The Roman City of Pompeii

The Roman Amphitheatre at Pula

The Aqueduct of Segovia

The Roman Buildings at Mérida

The Roman Ruins at Segóbriga

Diocletian’s Palace at Split

The Roman Buildings at Arles

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A Life in Ruins – Herculaneum, Italy

There are eight hundred and seventy-eight UNESCO World Heritage Sites and what is not altogether surprising is that Italy with forty-three of them is the single country with the most and that of course includes the archaeological area of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

If I had known just how easy it was to use the train to get around then I would have made my own cheaper arrangements to go to Herculaneum but the trip was paid for so along with everyone else we assembled outside the hotel and waited for the coach that was going to take us there.  The coach headed out of Sorrento back in the direction of Naples and went around the base of Vesuvius on the western side towards the modern town of Ercolano.  This was an untidy sort of town on the outskirts of the city and the drop off point seemed less than promising and left us with a long walk to the entrance to the site.

After the eruption the town of Herculaneum was buried under approximately twenty metres of lava, mud and ash and it lay hidden and nearly intact until it was accidentally discovered by some workers digging a well in 1709.  From there, the excavation process began but is still incomplete and today and the untidy Italian towns of Ercolano and Portici lie on the approximate site of old Herculaneum which prevents its complete excavation.

Sigmund Freud once compared the human mind to the city of Rome but he could also just as easily have used Herculaneum. He was talking about its intriguing series of layers and just as the human psyche has a build-up of memories,  Herculaneum has a history that goes down and down, deeper and deeper: every modern building is on top of a renaissance one, and under that there are medieval buildings, and then a footprint of ancient Rome itself.

Actually the excavation has now been suspended indefinitely to help preserve the ancient city.  The volcanic water, ash and debris covering Herculaneum, along with the extreme heat, left it in a remarkable state of preservation for over one thousand, six hundred years but once excavations began exposure to the elements began the slow process of deterioration. This was not helped by the methods of archaeology used earlier in the town’s excavation, which generally concentrated on recovering valuable artifacts rather than ensuring the survival of everything.  Tourism, vandalism as well as inappropriate excavation methods has damaged many of the areas open to the public, and water damage coming from the modern Ercolano has undermined many of the foundations of the buildings. Consequently the archeologists have decided that what remains buried is best left buried until it can be excavated safely.

From the entrance we had to descend into what resembles a deep pit through the twenty metres of tufa and down to the site itself and it became immediately apparent that Herculaneum is most unlike the remains at the site at Pompeii.  The people of Pompeii died from the effects of the poisonous fumes but it was very different in Herculaneum.

Pompeii was destroyed by fumes and ash that was carried by the wind in a south-easterly direction but Herculaneum was on the other side of the mountain to the west.  During the night, the column of volcanic debris which had risen into the stratosphere began falling back down onto Vesuvius.  A pyroclastic flow formed that sent a mixture of gas, ash, and rock that had reached a temperature of five hundred degrees centigrade racing down toward Herculaneum at a hundred kilometres an hour.  When it reached the city it buried the citizens who had fled to boat houses and were trying to escape and the intense heat killed them instantly.

A pyroclastic flow is ‘a ground-hugging avalanche of hot ash, pumice, rock fragments, and volcanic gas that rushes down the side of a volcano and the temperature within a flow may be so great that it is sufficient to burn and carbonise wood. Once deposited, because of the intense heat, the ash, pumice, and rock fragments deform and weld together.  Although it killed all of the inhabitants this flow did little damage to the structures, instead slowly filling them from the bottom up and preserving them perfectly without destroying them altogether.  Filling from the bottom in this way was important because at Pompeii most of the buildings were destroyed by the overhead weight of the ash being deposited on the buildings but this didn’t happen at Herculaneum.

Because this was an organised visit we enjoyed the company of an informative guide who took us around the main buildings and explained them to us and also an audio guide that filled in the details when afterwards we were left to wander about by ourselves through the houses and the streets of the old city.  No one knows for sure but visitors can only see about a fifth of the city which led me to speculate on what great treasures there must be waiting to be discovered in what remains perfectly preserved underneath the foundations of the modern town directly above.

Although the excavation site is much smaller than Pompeii, because of the state of preservation of the buildings I found Herculaneum to be more interesting.  The buildings are intact and the frescoes and the wall paintings are much more vivid and it is possible to visit the houses of important people (including Julius Ceaser’s father-in-law) and the shopping areas and public buildings and the boat houses where most of the inhabitants died as they tried to make their impossible escape from the approaching boiling lava flow.

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Related Articles:

Spartacus the Gladiator

Rome

The Roman City of Pompeii

The Roman Amphitheatre at Pula

The Aqueduct of Segovia

The Roman Buildings at Mérida

The Roman Ruins at Segóbriga

Diocletian’s Palace at Split

The Roman Buildings at Arles

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Sorrento, Herculaneum

If I had known just how easy it was to use the train to get around then I would have made my own cheaper arrangements to go to Herculaneum but the trip was paid for so along with everyone else we assembled outside the hotel and waited for the coach that was going to take us there.  The coach headed out of Sorrento back in the direction of Naples and went around the base of Vesuvius on the western side towards the modern town of Ercolano.  This was an untidy sort of town on the outskirts of the city and the drop off point seemed less than promising and left us with a long walk to the entrance to the site.

Read the full story…