European Adventure: Portici and a visit to Herculaneum

We were fairly exhausted this morning after our stressful day yesterday and the late night stuffing ourselves with homemade Italian food so we decided to take it slowly, eat a leisurely breakfast and do some grocery shopping in Portici before we did any sightseeing. The apartment is quite spacious and homely and our host left some provisions in the fridge for us which was lovely. We are on a main street but set back a bit so it's not noisy. The advantage is that we are close to everything. Fruit shops, supermarkets and the train station are a stone's throw away and for once we don't have a hundred stairs to climb!!

We wandered down to the supermarket after some brekky and on the way back decided to get some nectarines at the fruit shop directly across the road from the apartment. Claudia went in and picked up a nectarine to buy but was severely chastised in Italian by the store owner - apparently he's the only one allowed to touch the fruit!

Claudia dutifully waiting to be served!

The Main Street of Portici. If you look closely at the first picture the sea is in the distance.

After unpacking our groceries we headed off to the station to get the train to Ercolano where the Herculaneum is excavated. It was only one station away so that was easy!

The ancient city was discovered back in 1710 when a farmer was excavating a well. It was fascinating. We purchased an audio guide which was well worth the euros as there weren't many info points around the excavation site and the commentary was really interesting albeit a bit confusing at times!

It was difficult to believe that we were walking along streets that Romans in 3 BC had walked on. Some of the mosaic floors and wall frescos were amazingly preserved. We intend to visit Pompei as well but apparently Herculaneum is better preserved and gives a good indication of what village life would have been like at the time. We saw a bakery, a blacksmith shop and even the equivalent of a Roman takeaway food shop. It was customary for Romans to buy lunch and either eat outside the shop or take it home to eat. The big pots for food were still in place. Amazing! Some of the villas would have been massive as there were originally three storeys to some of them.

Seeing the preserved skeletons in the solidified ashes was a bit confronting. They were situated in an area which would have been the beachfront at the time but the lava and ashflow created another 50/100 metres of beach. They were most likely to have been trying to escape to the water and had valuable possessions with them. Most of the valuable findings are in the Naples museum now. I was really captivated by this place.

Ercolano as a town is very run down and almost ghetto like. Obviously none of the money that the tourists pay gets sunk into any kind of beautification of the town. I guess it goes into the excavation and preservation work of Herculaneum.

After we've crashed for a while we intend to go down to the waterside where we've been told there is excellent fish/calamari and chips which they serve in a paper cone.