When last we left our intrepid Italy travellers, they were rolling home after a truly memorable tour and tasting at the Mustilli Winery. We pick things up the next day.
The day began with a departure from our Naples hotel and a road trip to Amalfi by way of Pompeii – one of those places that has been on my personal bucket list since first I became aware of the tragedy that annihilated both it and the nearby town of Herculaneum in 79 A.D.
I won’t go into the history here in detail, since its essential facts likely are quite well known, but I’ll add a bunch of tidbits by way of several photos I took during what we were told was actually a light day in terms of crowds. (Apparently, the site is typically way more packed than it was the day we got there, which certainly seemed busy to us.)
Once again, the benefits of being in the company of a graduate in archaeology made themselves quite clear and we came away with a whole lot more than we would have had we visited simply as a clutch of self-guided travellers. So here we go:
Pompeii, you will recall, suffered its suffocating cloud of Mt Vesuvius’s volcanic ash so swiftly and so thoroughly that, eventually, archaeologists were able to learn in astonishing detail what life typically was like in the early morning of an ordinary day in 79 A.D. in a Roman seaport town. There are two main reasons for this: 1. Everything that was buried was incredibly well preserved, and 2. After the hot suffocating ash buried thousands of Pompeiians and their pets, it eventually vapourized their bodies as it cooled and left hollows that, when filled with plaster, yielded casts so detailed that even the victims’ facial expressions could be read.
The results are truly eerie and the effect is like being in the presence of an unwrapped mummy.
This photo is of one of the countless dogs freely roaming the excavation site and I’m sharing it here because when we turned the corner and almost tripped over the leisurely lounging canine, I was sure it had been trained to do this by a present-day Pompeiian with a macabre sense of humour.
Why?
Because perhaps the most famous of the city’s non-human casts is the Dog of Pompeii, and this countless-generations-later descendant appears to have recaptured the panicked 1stC A.D. death of his distant ancestor with a pretty remarkable contemporary tribute. (The actual Pompeiian dog cast was on tour during our visit to the ruins, part of a London exhibit entitled
“Life and Death in Pompeii”, so this grab is from Mr Del Ferraro’s English 8 Class blog,
http://ddelferraro.blogspot.ca/). But you see what I mean about the living tribute.
Earlier, I talked about Pompeii’s phallic phascination when we toured the Archaeological Museum in Naples. In the ruins of Pompeii proper, meanwhile, it seems that one of the most popular visits is to see what’s left of one of its brothels. (It was the only place in the whole town where we had to wait in line to get in – no pun intended.)
Consorting with prostitutes was pretty much just another form of commerce in the 1stC A.D. in southern Italy.
In Pompeii, as you entered the place where the business was carried on, you didn’t even have to be literate because, overhead, like the illuminated panel behind the cash registers at today’s McDonald’s counters, was a painted “menu” of options that the business offered for what was roughly the price of a bottle of wine. You just had to point and say,
“I’d like one of those, please”, after which you were escorted to one of the adjacent service bays whose furniture and décor, clearly, were not designed to encourage lingering. (Hey, business is business and even among prostitutes the aim was a fast turnover. Make of that what you will.)
Stone floor; stone bed; stone pillow. The client “suites” in Pompeii’s brothel clearly were not designed for anything but functionality.
This is a close-up of a pedestrian crosswalk at one of the many street corners in Pompeii. The elevated stones show how much care the citizens took to avoid dirtying their feet crossing the roads whose endless horse-drawn traffic would eventually leave a murky mess in the street. But this shot also shows something else. When a visitor to Pompeii wanted to move about in a carriage or cart for whatever reason, he or she had to use one provided by the town. The spacing of the wheels on the city-provided carts, you see, was precisely measured so as to travel between the massive flagstones. In fact, so successful was the practice that the Pompeiian rent-a-carts eventually wore ruts in the narrow gaps between the stones, which you can see quite clearly here. (It’s a reminder that Pompeii had a centuries-long thriving history before the eruption and what you see here is the result of an estimated 700 years of wear and tear before it was wiped out.)
If a Pompeiian household displayed a phallus anywhere near its front door, it meant that visitors were welcomed. If, on the other hand, the visitor encountered a representation of a dog (whether sculpture, painting or, as you see here, a gorgeous mosaic) it was the equivalent of the ubiquitous
“No Soliciting” signs that homeowners display on their mailboxes today.
The fact that this particular image depicts a dog that is big, black and chained would tend to make the message from this homeowner a most emphatic one.
Despite the fact the city is in ruins, it abounds with shapes and patterns that make for some wonderful photos.
Pompeii’s thermal baths have astounded water engineers ever since they were first uncovered. Built beneath the floors of the baths’ many pools was a system of plumbing and piping so well constructed that a constant flow of well-heated water was circulated throughout the baths. The Romans loved bathing and Pompeii’s baths ensured a constant flow of fresh, hot water, a sanitary plumbing technology that ultimately would be all but forgotten during the centuries of the Dark Ages, a loss that would provide a welcoming environment for the spread of disease and pandemics like the Black Death.
Like every other Roman city of the time, Pompeii had a large and bustling public forum that served as a market centre and location for several of the city’s temples.
In this photo, Vesuvius looms in the background. The clouds that obscure what’s left of its eruption-blown summit are simply a meteorological coincidence. Apparently, there are still vents that spit out small amounts of steam, but nothing of the density that these clouds might mistakenly suggest. Officially, however, Vesuvius is still active so maybe one day… who knows?
Pompeii will be a continuing archaeological dig for centuries. Despite the extent of the city that has already been uncovered, even today more still lies buried than has been exposed. Whether it retains its importance in the list of Italian government spending priorities remains to be seen as Italy, like so many other countries in Europe, continues to weather a deepening economic crisis.
It all comes down to just how important people feel it is to know how we got to where we are today. (And speaking as someone whose Italian heritage inevitably means that two millennia ago I probably lost several distant ancestors in the Vesuvius blast, put me down for “Very Important”.)
One of Pompeii’s ironies is that, amid its growing sea of exposed ruins, signs like this one, warning of freshly excavated ruins, will be a part of its landscape for a long time to come.
= = =
The Roman god of weather (that’d be Jupiter, who assumed that portfolio in addition to being the overall head of the entire Roman panoply of deities) was clearly with us on this day because it was only after we left Pompeii and resumed our trip south to Amalfi that the skies opened up and we were pelted with rain for a good part of the journey.
Even on a rainy day, the towns along the Amalfi coast road offer views that are simply gorgeous.
The cheerful ceramic face at this overlook marks the town of Vietri sul Mare, the first of the Amalfi
“pearls” along the coast road (or the last if you’re travelling north) where it seems that every single business that isn’t offering food or drink is related to ceramics.
Vietri’s history in the production of ceramics is estimated to be at least 600 years old and its output ranges from an endless variety of jewellery through beautiful vases, decorative tiles, table place settings and wall art, to more functional applications like
this roughly five-foot diameter round tabletop, whose central design is nicely echoed in a rectangular version visible inside the shop in the background.
And just in case you missed the hint in the principal decorative motif on that tabletop, the Amalfi coast is also home to some of the most amazing treatment of lemons in just about any configuration you can imagine, including a fantastic (and potent!) liqueur called limoncello (pronounced lee-mun-CHELL-o).
Before we left Vietri, Leslie and I made a point of popping into a gelateria and enjoying a lemon gelato cone that simply would leave North American lemon gelato servings weeping with envy! Like so much else I’ve tried to describe throughout this trip log, I can only recommend you add Amalfi lemon gelato to your own personal bucket list.
You don’t have to go as far to enjoy limoncello. In several parts of the province of Ontario, there are sizeable communities of Italians who, I suspect, have demanded that the LCBO import that particular bit of the “old country”. Here in Ottawa, you typically can find two or three different labels in the local liquor stores, and several friends have told me the internet is loaded with recipes for making it at home. (But unless you have an Amalfi lemon bootlegger, all you’ll be making, I’m afraid, is lemon-flavoured liqueur. A Sunkist lemon is a pale imitation of its gigantic, more robust Italian relative, a single one of which can tip the scale at over a kilo in weight.)
I found this comparative photo on a food blog called going-with-my-gut.com and it made me laugh because the author chose to caption it, “Luuuuke… I am your faaaaa…therrrrr.” He also notes that he bought it at a stand where they were priced at 5 Euros per kilo and this giant cost him 7 Euros. As he concluded, if the Amalfi mafia ever throws you lemons, DUCK!
A couple notes about driving the Amalfi Coast road. I have considerable respect now for those who are able to do it, especially our own intrepid Luigi who not only was able to manage driving it, but was able to do so at the wheel of a small bus!
That road is a classic cliffside clinger with turns so sharp there are several large post-mounted convex mirrors along the way so you can see if anything is approaching from the other direction as you head into the turn.
Now that said, drivers also tend to be quite cautious about driving it and when I went looking for a factoid about accident data (Hey, I aim to be thorough in my reporting), I found only comment after comment about how few there really are. One recommendation I do have for the queasy who might have a bit of resident acrophobia… you want to be on the driver’s side of the car travelling south, and the passenger side travelling north. (That’s for North American cars, of course. If you’re English, then naturally it’s the other way around.) Because the plummet is on the right when you’re travelling south.
At day’s end, we checked into a beautifully sited waterfront hotel right in Amalfi – the Bussola. It’s the Italian word for compass and the lobby had a couple of beautiful examples of early ship-borne versions of the navigation aid that I suspect would give palpitations to the guys who host “The Antiques Roadshow”.
I snapped this photo that was on display in the lobby. It shows the hotel under construction (lower right) in 1910. Aside from the fact that many more of the vessels in the harbour today are running with high-powered motors, the overall view hasn’t changed much.
I mean really, how can you beat vistas like these for balcony views?
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