Day Trip to Herculaneum and Olipoli
Trip Start
Feb 05, 2010
1
36
101
Trip End
May 20, 2010
Where I stayed
Sorrento, Campania, Italy
Friday, March 12, 2010
We buy an all day ticket for 3.9E. We go to Eucolano (Herculaneum). It is a ten minute walk to S. Angello train station. We take the train to Ercolano Scavi (excavation) which is suburb of Naples.
Herculaneum
named after the mighty Herculus. A papyrus library of of 1,800
philosophical texts was extracted in 1927. They are housed in the
Naples National Library. It was apeaceful Roman fishing and port town of 4,000 when Versuvius eruptedand it “drowned in a 16m thick sea of mud” (Lonely Planet).
We see a huge statue of Herculus in the Naples Archeological Museum. He has the most developed muscles I've seen in any statue.
Learn
more at www.herculaneum.org.
Since 2001 a conservation project has been underway to make it safer
for visitors to explore. As in Pompei, emphasis is on restoring what
has been discovered rather than making new discoveries.
I did not find it that interesting after Pompei, but if you visit Pompei and want more this is the place to go. It is much smaller and less crowded than Pompei. For lunch we have pasta with meat sauce, minestrone soup (vegetable) for $7 each. There is a virtual museum but we don't go.
We have a good chat with two English speaking guides. The elder guide is keep for our business but we explain we are budget tourists. I ask him the silliest question a tourist has asked him. They have numbers here to indicate sites on audio tour. He has been asked if these
numbers are the originals. Of course, back then Roman Numerals were used and Steve tells me there was no zero in the numbering system. We discuss politics. An election is coming up and the end of the month and there are lots of political posters – it seem like almost all
the candidates are male. As usual we tell them we've been married for
30 years and enquire on their marital status. They think the divorce
rate in Italy is 30%.
Another train ride takes us to Oplontis. We get off at the Torre Annunziata
stop. A ten minute walk takes us to another archeological site.
Oplontis was an aristocratic Roman villa built for Nero's wife. It
had a huge swimming pool. It is important for its frescos. There are
designs of birds, ferns, fountains, bird baths, and architectural
decorations. There is only two other tourists and I can hear birds as
I look at birds painted almost 2,000 years ago.
The Circumvesuviana Trains run 24 hours a day. There is a strike from 8:00pm to midnight, but I consider it quite civilized since there are signs announcing the strike several days ahead of time. An electronic sign on the train tells us the name of the prossina fermata (next stop). One of my pet peeves about Italy is graffiti. Some of the train station name signs are completely covered up and there is lots of graffiti on the outside (but not the inside) of trains.
Dinner from supermarket includes cheese from German and muesli from Austria. There are a lot of lemon products here - even lemon chocolate.
