2019.April 13-14: Herculaneum (Gulf of Naples, part 1)

20 years ago, I missed out on our Latin Class trip to Italy (Rome! Pompeii! Herculaneum! Probably other stuff I since forgot), and finally got to make up for it. Also, given it has been 20 years, apparently a lot of excavation work has happened in between, so maybe it is even better in many ways now that it would have been then.

[For those not in the know, I had three years of Latin in High School and a fourth in college. For some reason, Latin clubs are really popular in Texas and get-togethers involving everything from written exams in various areas to quiz-show style teams ("certamen" -- i was the mythology expert) as well as how-tos (wear a toga) or theater pieces (in English, with classic themes)]

First stop: Portici/Herculaneum (Present day: Ercolano)

TL;DR if you have to choose one of the two (Pompeii or Herculaneum), choose Herculaneum. Quality over quantity (as our guide said).

Worried somewhat about the notorious crime in Naples, we planned the trip to fly in/out of there and not actually spend any time in the city. So we stayed in Portici. The place we were staying suggested we could pay 30 Euros (and save an hour time) and be picked up from the airport.  The view from the hotel room was nice, and the recommended restaurant for dinner was quite good.

Sadly, we seemed to be located across from (but 3 (very tall) floors up) a night club with incredibly high quality speakers which blasted music from around midnight/1am until 4 or 5am and we slept terribly.

The weather prediction the next day was rain, so we had cancelled our pre-booked tour for the afternoon. The morning dawned reasonably clear, so we headed to the site and there were people standing by the line, advertising tours in various languages. We expressed interest in English, and in the end we were 10 people.

Pompeii and Herculaneum - what happened? In 79 AD (we are pretty sure now it was October, not August), Vesuvius erupted in a rather catastrophic way, burying Pompeii and Herculaneum (and some of the other area neighboring current-day Naples). Pliny the Elder told his son (Pliny the Younger) to stay behind while he checked it out, and our account of the whole thing comes from the younger Pliny's writings,   including some notes salvaged from his father's trip.

Pliny the younger was in Micenum (left finger of land). Pompeii is the lower right of this picture, and Herculaneum (Ercolano) is halfway between Naples and Pompeii on the coast:

Why has everyone heard of Pompeii?

• It was excavated first, and much longer, and 
• (as a result) a lot of the good stuff was already taken away during the reign of the Bourbon King(s). 
• It is also much bigger.  

It was a town of middle class, new upper class, and tons of workers.
Herculaneum was a resort town with nice weather.

first view of Herculaneum site

Back to that first point -- Pompeii was covered in incredibly hot ash, effectively vaporizing the inhabitants. Herculaneum was spared a few days (and some of the temperature) due to winds pushing things over to Pompeii. So Herculaneum has actual remains of peoples' bones, which was useful for figuring out interesting stuff like -- that the lead in the pipes was not being absorbed into their bodies (theory being the calcium lined the pipes so quickly, it formed a protective layer)).

Oh, right! Pompeii has stepping stones. Herculaneum does not because they had actual sewage systems/pipes. They also all could afford pipes bringing water from the fountains into their fancy houses.

There is also a theory that it was not the gasses that killed the people of Herculaneum, but their blood boiling in their veins. Grim. This analysis was done using what we have of their bones.

Herculaneum was covered more aggressively with lava, Pompeii was ash and a little lava, which makes Herculaneum much much harder to excavate, but what is excavated is well preserved. E.g. the second floors of some buildings, and even some wood.

Example: shutters and doors of still-extant wood:

You can see how much material was dropped in the eruption, because we were standing on it, looking down. I think 25 meters?  Here, Vesuvius is behind the clouds in the upper left.

what used to be the edge of Herculaneum, facing the sea

Back to the bones, and the timing of the eruptions. People in Pompeii died here, there, everywhere. People in Herculaneum died at the sea, having all fled to the docks hoping the escape by ship. These are where the ships were, and they found bones (replicas are there now (that is what everyone is looking at), the real ones elsewhere):

Down by the bones is a swamp with a cacophany of frogs.

Some insights into Roman construction and life

1. Cheap housing for workers 

Our guide explained some interesting things about construction (better preservation = more information), including that while the fancy villas were stone, the occasional building in Herculaneum which was built to house workers was built of much less quality materials, basically like "half-timbered homes" (Fachwerkhaeuser) in Germany, with wood frames and kind of mixed materials between as cheap insulation.

I thought this was cool, as it to me it suggests that it is not so much that people forgot architecture during the dark ages, but only remembered how to build stuff for the lower classes (which maybe involved fewer people/was built faster).

Example:

workers apartments in Herculaneum

2. Pyramidal shaped building blocks , Marble-clad columns

There had been an earthquake in 62 AD which destroyed a fair amount of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and astonishingly, people came up with some interesting ways to deal with future earthquakes. The stones used were sort of tetrahedrons, on their sides, and concrete was poured between (Reminder: Romans invented concrete). Left picture, with our guide explaining the blocks.
I enjoyed that the columns (unlike in Greece) are brick and mortar, covered with marble (right):

3. "Pompeii red" -- maybe sometimes just oxidized ochre

There is a theory that the infamous "pompeii red" is the result of the oxidization of yellow paint (in at least some cases). You can see here the yellow paint which sort of morphs to red about a meter off the ground (warm air rises, makes sense original color might stay close to the ground).

5. Pricing via color of the amphora (pretty clever)

6. Penises as good luck symbols (here in the baths):

 Some beautiful things still there

This was a temple dedicated to the cult of Augustus (see: emperor worship) which we know because there is a plaque on the wall stating as much. It is a good example of the really well-preserved frescos which are still on the walls (in Pompeii, you often need to go to the museum in Naples (former residence of the Bourbon Kings, who ran off with the stuff 3 centuries ago)). Note: women were painted white, dudes painted brown. Brown dude here is Hercules.

This is another nice example of the kinds of mosaics/art still preserved on-site in Herculaneum:

Lots of floor mosaics. Here is an entryway. You can see the compluvium (the buildings were open, letting light, air and water in, which collected in a small pool that overflowed into a reservoir under the floor):

To the next post: Vietri Sul Mare, where we stayed during our week of hikes along the Amalfi Coast.