The Bay of Naples
May. 19th, 2014 09:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyofastolatAs you could probably guess from all the comical animals I posted yesterday, we returned yesterday from a week exploring the Bay of Naples. Here follows far too many photos, and much rambling.
We were staying in Sorrento, where we arrived at the hotel on the Saturday night to find a bottle of complimentary Prosecco, and a nice view from a welcome balcony. I'm not generally fond of fizzy stuff, but I will always make an exception for anything free. :-D
Here is the view that greeted us from our room in the morning.
Pompeii
On the Sunday, we made the first of our many, many journeys on the Circumvesuviana train, and went to Pompeii. What can I say about Pompeii that hasn't been said before? Very little, probably. Quite a lot of the buildings all the books linger over were closed and covered with scaffolding, but there was still enough to occupy us for two days: the southern half of the site on the Sunday, and the northern part on Wednesday, when we stayed from about 10 a.m. until nearly 7.
Top tips for anyone thinking of visiting Pompeii:
- All the crowds magically disappear after about 5.30, so if you want to get the forum almost to yourself, stay late. (The site is open until 7.30 in the summer.)
- As soon as you arrive, go to the furthest parts of the site, and then work backwards, in the opposite direction to everyone else.
- Just 100 yards from teeming streets, you can always find deserted back streets. Some of them contain amazing houses that are just as good as any of the tourist-thronged ones.
- Buy a detailed guide book that contains floor plans.
- There are lots of taps with drinking water, so there's no need to take lots of water, just an empty bottle.
Many of my pictures of Pompeii have been captioned "an atrium," often one seen through locked gates. Here are a few that are not.
A deserted (or almost deserted) street in Regio VI, towards the end of the day:
The southern end of the Forum, looking into the sun near the end of the day.
The forum almost deserted at the end of the day. The only annoying thing is that the evening light is wrong for taking the iconic view of the forum with Vesivius in the background, but I reckon that the mountains in the other direction probably get a bit sad about not being included in most people's Pompeii pictures, so I thought I'd give them a moment of mild glory. Mild nameless glory, sadly for them.
The picture below illustrates the Ostia effect. In Ostia, we got desperately excited by the first Baths we found, and spent ages with them, gushing about how amazing they were, and taking loads of pictures. By the end of the day, we'd found a dozen far better Baths, but were short of time, so paid a lot less attention to them than we had to the first and least of them.
This was our first marble counter top in a Roman takeaway, so I duly photographed it. Now that I look at it, I realise that we saw a few hundred far better marble counter tops in far better light, all of which I failed to photograph. Oh well.
Pellinor is studying it with that worrying sparkle in his eye which means "can I install a marble counter top at the Summerfest bar, and sink enormous terracotta soup kettles into it?" Whenever I see that sparkle, I say a firm "No. No, we can't," even before hearing what the suggestion is. This is wise, or so I have learnt.
This was one of the Serendipitous Houses, hidden up a back street that hardly anyone else visited in Regio V. It's the House of Marcus Lucretio Fronto, I believe.
I liked this floor (which was, I think, in the House of the Faun, more famous for the Alexander Mosaic). It reminds me of the colouring books I had as a child, where every page consisted of patterns forms by tesselating geometrical shapes. Anyone else remember them?
Here, rather dark, is a ceiling in the Forum Baths. I liked the chappies holding it up. Most of them had very cute furry shorts, but two chaps were completely naked. Were they being punished? Had they forgotten their games kit on the day of the sculpting, so were sternly told that they just had to do it naked, then.
This is a lararium (or maybe a cupboard) in the House of Menander, sacred to the Giant Household Waffle.
This should have been included in my Comical Animals post, but the only reason I took it was because Pellinor is collecting picture of angry swans for some strange LARP-related reason, so rashly asked me to photograph any swan we found, before realising that we would find about 100 thousand of the things. Romans do seem to like their swans.
Here, courtesy of a notice in Pompeii, we finally learn the difference between civilised Romans and the barbarians. I always thought it was trousers, but apparently I was wrong.
Herculaneum
We went to Herculaneum on the Monday, and spent all day there, walking every inch of the place. Early on, I noticed that a group of 3 women, who had shared our train carriage, were going round at a similarly slow pace. We kept bumping into them (not literally!), stopped for lunch at the same time, and left at the same time. They had obviously noticed us, too, since they said "we've all done very well!" as we left. We lost them on the way to the station. I hope they didn't get eaten.
One of the most exciting things about Herculaneum was the (modern) vending machines. The ice cream one was particularly exciting, involving a mechanical arm moving around until it located the correct ice cream, sucking it up with a blast of air, then hurling it at you. It was fine with Magnums, but Cornettos seemed to cause it much confusion. I was not the only British tourist who giggled with crazy glee at the machines, and felt the urge to buy more stuff just to see it in action again. Yup. Easily pleased. :-D
Herculaneum reminded me quite strongly of the lost city in Thief: Deadly Shadows, where your character goes to a ruined ancient city, surrounded by bubbling lava, and leaps around on the top of square-ish beige buildings.
I don't seem to have taken many pictures, but it was very good. Here is a random nymphaeum.
Pellinor got shouted at furiously by a tour guide and a site guard for daring to stand firmly on this side of a rope, looking into a roped-off area, which seemed very unfair, and upset me rather. :-(
Naples
Tuesday went a bit wrong, because we'd stupidly forgotten to check the opening times for the Archaeological Museum in Naples. We remembered that lots of things in Rome were closed on Mondays, so on Monday we made sure that our planned destination was still open, but we hadn't remembered to check other days, too. We ended up going to Castello Nuovo, which has a rather amazing 15th century gateway stuck in between its solid, older, dark towers. Here is a detail:
Inside, about 150 members of staff (or so it seemed) were sitting around glaring at the very few tourists, or loudly chatting. Staff at many heritage sites in Europe do seem to be very much Guards, rather than the smiling, friendly Guides I'm used to from National Trust and English Heritage properties.
There was an amazing set of bronze doors (which sadly didn't photograph well) and lots of medieval and Renaissance art, some of which I posted details from yesterday. There was also a bit were you could walk on a glass floor over Roman foundations about six feet below. It was surprisingly difficult to do so. "Wrong!" cries the brain. "This is wrong!"
After the castle, we planned to head back to Sorrento and explore it a little, but someone fainted on the train, which caused a very long delay, and by the time we reached Sorrento, it was raining.
We returned to Naples on the Thursday, where we did get to the Museum, where almost all my pictures ended up in my Comical Animals post. I did like this translation, though:
Oplontis and Pozzuoli
On the Friday, we went first to Oplontis, to visit the villa there, which is covered with very well preserved frescos, many of them involving peacocks and tragedy masks. Very impressive... but it didn't photograph too well, and I've already posted more than enough Roman frescos.
Oh, but here's a peristyle, which I took to remind myself of the fact that nearly all the columns we saw were fluted higher up, but smooth at the bottom. My conclusion is that this was Roman Health and Safety.
Then we went to Pozzuoli, where we visited Solfatara, which has an interesting casual attitude to health and safety. It's an old crater of an ancient volcano, where gas pours out of vents and holes, coming out at 160 degrees C. Your feet get noticeably hot even throuh thick soles, and you can burn your hand if you press it to the ground. (Not that anybody would be stupid enough to do this, Pellinor.) The guide book said it was full of "entertaining fumaroles," which is my new favoured band name. No guards or barriers kept idiot tourists away from this scaldingly hot gas that gouted out from the ground with much roaring.
Then we went to the amphitheatre, the third biggest known. It was interesting, if lacking in interpretation. However, we spent a lot of our time watching a highway of ants. One team carried in bits of leaf and fluff, while another team carried out bits of rubble and yellow petals. (The Queen obviously spurns gifts of yellow petals.) One poor chap was lugging along such a big burden that he kept bumping into things, often other ants, who tried to steal his burden. We watched him on his epic trek home, and gave him a little cheer when finally, after ten years of journeying, he made it home from Troy.
Capri
On Saturday, once we'd tramped up and down Sorrento trying to find a cash machine, we caught the ferry to Capri, where we did a lot of walking: up to Villa Jovis (Tiberius' villa), then around the coast, and then up 960-ish steps to Anacapri. These were a bit of a slog going up, but actually harder to go down, since the steps were irregular, and a bit too big for me. I managed to navigate them safely, only to fall over on an uneven tile on the flat bit at the bottom. My shin has turned into a very impressive bruise.
Angry weather threatening. It never came, but all day long, the dark cloud remained on this particular hill. It's probably Science.
Here is a very appropriate goat, just outside the Villa Jovis:
We paid for a boat trip around part of the island, which took in the Blue Grotto. In common, I think, with everyone else on the boat, we didn't fully understand what this meant. What this meant was that once we reached the outside of the lagoon, we were mobbed by chaps in rowing boats offering to take us into the grotto. This involved sitting on the floor of a tiny boat, squeezed in tight. "Lie down!" the boatman shouted, taking us fast towards a tiny opening, as we struggled to lie down in not nearly enough space to do so. Pellinor nearly got decapitated by the chain he dragged us in with.
He then rowed us around in darkness for about 1 minute, singing in the echo, while the other boatmen sang different songs. It was pitchy dark at first, and almost scary, crowded in the bottom of a boat while echoing voices sang all around you. But when you looked back over your shoulder, it was all shiny blue.
After about a minute, or even less, he took us out again and returned us to our boat. This all cost 13 Euros a person. And they say the Solent is the most expensive stretch of water in the world!
Here is Tiberius' villa from the ferry. (Or, rather, here is the rather more modern church that has been built on the highest point of the villa ruins.) I was particularly amused to see the notice at the top of Tiberius' cliff, reading (in Italian) "don't throw things over."
We ate in the hotel on about half the nights, since we got in late and tired, and it was easier than touring the streets of Sorrento. We were clearly Special in some way, since we got an extra glass of Prosecco and a extra little starter that very few other people got. We still don't know what we did!
On a couple of nights, we bought Limoncello to drink in our room. This was not, perhaps, wise. Nice, though!
Many of the hotel reviews on Tripadvisor waxed lyrical about the "egg lady" at breakfast. I only had eggses on two mornings, but I discovered her secret. We always aimed to have a big enough breakfast to avoid the need for anything more than a snack at lunch time, but on the two days I had Egg Lady's scrambled eggses, I remained not even the tiniest bit peckish all the way through to dinner time. Magic eggses, clearly.
We left yesterday morning, early - the hotel gave us a packed breakfast (minus magic eggses*), which was nice - and landed at about 12.30. England, we discovered, was hotter and sunnier than Naples had been all week. This shouldn't happen!
* No magic eggses for breakfast, but we stopped for a late lunch at a service station on the M25, where I had a magic carvery roll - an absolutely enormous one. It is now 20 hours later, and all I've eaten since then is a slice of toast, and I'm still not hungry.
We were staying in Sorrento, where we arrived at the hotel on the Saturday night to find a bottle of complimentary Prosecco, and a nice view from a welcome balcony. I'm not generally fond of fizzy stuff, but I will always make an exception for anything free. :-D
Here is the view that greeted us from our room in the morning.
Pompeii
On the Sunday, we made the first of our many, many journeys on the Circumvesuviana train, and went to Pompeii. What can I say about Pompeii that hasn't been said before? Very little, probably. Quite a lot of the buildings all the books linger over were closed and covered with scaffolding, but there was still enough to occupy us for two days: the southern half of the site on the Sunday, and the northern part on Wednesday, when we stayed from about 10 a.m. until nearly 7.
Top tips for anyone thinking of visiting Pompeii:
- All the crowds magically disappear after about 5.30, so if you want to get the forum almost to yourself, stay late. (The site is open until 7.30 in the summer.)
- As soon as you arrive, go to the furthest parts of the site, and then work backwards, in the opposite direction to everyone else.
- Just 100 yards from teeming streets, you can always find deserted back streets. Some of them contain amazing houses that are just as good as any of the tourist-thronged ones.
- Buy a detailed guide book that contains floor plans.
- There are lots of taps with drinking water, so there's no need to take lots of water, just an empty bottle.
Many of my pictures of Pompeii have been captioned "an atrium," often one seen through locked gates. Here are a few that are not.
A deserted (or almost deserted) street in Regio VI, towards the end of the day:
The southern end of the Forum, looking into the sun near the end of the day.
The forum almost deserted at the end of the day. The only annoying thing is that the evening light is wrong for taking the iconic view of the forum with Vesivius in the background, but I reckon that the mountains in the other direction probably get a bit sad about not being included in most people's Pompeii pictures, so I thought I'd give them a moment of mild glory. Mild nameless glory, sadly for them.
The picture below illustrates the Ostia effect. In Ostia, we got desperately excited by the first Baths we found, and spent ages with them, gushing about how amazing they were, and taking loads of pictures. By the end of the day, we'd found a dozen far better Baths, but were short of time, so paid a lot less attention to them than we had to the first and least of them.
This was our first marble counter top in a Roman takeaway, so I duly photographed it. Now that I look at it, I realise that we saw a few hundred far better marble counter tops in far better light, all of which I failed to photograph. Oh well.
Pellinor is studying it with that worrying sparkle in his eye which means "can I install a marble counter top at the Summerfest bar, and sink enormous terracotta soup kettles into it?" Whenever I see that sparkle, I say a firm "No. No, we can't," even before hearing what the suggestion is. This is wise, or so I have learnt.
This was one of the Serendipitous Houses, hidden up a back street that hardly anyone else visited in Regio V. It's the House of Marcus Lucretio Fronto, I believe.
I liked this floor (which was, I think, in the House of the Faun, more famous for the Alexander Mosaic). It reminds me of the colouring books I had as a child, where every page consisted of patterns forms by tesselating geometrical shapes. Anyone else remember them?
Here, rather dark, is a ceiling in the Forum Baths. I liked the chappies holding it up. Most of them had very cute furry shorts, but two chaps were completely naked. Were they being punished? Had they forgotten their games kit on the day of the sculpting, so were sternly told that they just had to do it naked, then.
This is a lararium (or maybe a cupboard) in the House of Menander, sacred to the Giant Household Waffle.
This should have been included in my Comical Animals post, but the only reason I took it was because Pellinor is collecting picture of angry swans for some strange LARP-related reason, so rashly asked me to photograph any swan we found, before realising that we would find about 100 thousand of the things. Romans do seem to like their swans.
Here, courtesy of a notice in Pompeii, we finally learn the difference between civilised Romans and the barbarians. I always thought it was trousers, but apparently I was wrong.
Herculaneum
We went to Herculaneum on the Monday, and spent all day there, walking every inch of the place. Early on, I noticed that a group of 3 women, who had shared our train carriage, were going round at a similarly slow pace. We kept bumping into them (not literally!), stopped for lunch at the same time, and left at the same time. They had obviously noticed us, too, since they said "we've all done very well!" as we left. We lost them on the way to the station. I hope they didn't get eaten.
One of the most exciting things about Herculaneum was the (modern) vending machines. The ice cream one was particularly exciting, involving a mechanical arm moving around until it located the correct ice cream, sucking it up with a blast of air, then hurling it at you. It was fine with Magnums, but Cornettos seemed to cause it much confusion. I was not the only British tourist who giggled with crazy glee at the machines, and felt the urge to buy more stuff just to see it in action again. Yup. Easily pleased. :-D
Herculaneum reminded me quite strongly of the lost city in Thief: Deadly Shadows, where your character goes to a ruined ancient city, surrounded by bubbling lava, and leaps around on the top of square-ish beige buildings.
I don't seem to have taken many pictures, but it was very good. Here is a random nymphaeum.
Pellinor got shouted at furiously by a tour guide and a site guard for daring to stand firmly on this side of a rope, looking into a roped-off area, which seemed very unfair, and upset me rather. :-(
Naples
Tuesday went a bit wrong, because we'd stupidly forgotten to check the opening times for the Archaeological Museum in Naples. We remembered that lots of things in Rome were closed on Mondays, so on Monday we made sure that our planned destination was still open, but we hadn't remembered to check other days, too. We ended up going to Castello Nuovo, which has a rather amazing 15th century gateway stuck in between its solid, older, dark towers. Here is a detail:
Inside, about 150 members of staff (or so it seemed) were sitting around glaring at the very few tourists, or loudly chatting. Staff at many heritage sites in Europe do seem to be very much Guards, rather than the smiling, friendly Guides I'm used to from National Trust and English Heritage properties.
There was an amazing set of bronze doors (which sadly didn't photograph well) and lots of medieval and Renaissance art, some of which I posted details from yesterday. There was also a bit were you could walk on a glass floor over Roman foundations about six feet below. It was surprisingly difficult to do so. "Wrong!" cries the brain. "This is wrong!"
After the castle, we planned to head back to Sorrento and explore it a little, but someone fainted on the train, which caused a very long delay, and by the time we reached Sorrento, it was raining.
We returned to Naples on the Thursday, where we did get to the Museum, where almost all my pictures ended up in my Comical Animals post. I did like this translation, though:
Oplontis and Pozzuoli
On the Friday, we went first to Oplontis, to visit the villa there, which is covered with very well preserved frescos, many of them involving peacocks and tragedy masks. Very impressive... but it didn't photograph too well, and I've already posted more than enough Roman frescos.
Oh, but here's a peristyle, which I took to remind myself of the fact that nearly all the columns we saw were fluted higher up, but smooth at the bottom. My conclusion is that this was Roman Health and Safety.
Then we went to Pozzuoli, where we visited Solfatara, which has an interesting casual attitude to health and safety. It's an old crater of an ancient volcano, where gas pours out of vents and holes, coming out at 160 degrees C. Your feet get noticeably hot even throuh thick soles, and you can burn your hand if you press it to the ground. (Not that anybody would be stupid enough to do this, Pellinor.) The guide book said it was full of "entertaining fumaroles," which is my new favoured band name. No guards or barriers kept idiot tourists away from this scaldingly hot gas that gouted out from the ground with much roaring.
Then we went to the amphitheatre, the third biggest known. It was interesting, if lacking in interpretation. However, we spent a lot of our time watching a highway of ants. One team carried in bits of leaf and fluff, while another team carried out bits of rubble and yellow petals. (The Queen obviously spurns gifts of yellow petals.) One poor chap was lugging along such a big burden that he kept bumping into things, often other ants, who tried to steal his burden. We watched him on his epic trek home, and gave him a little cheer when finally, after ten years of journeying, he made it home from Troy.
Capri
On Saturday, once we'd tramped up and down Sorrento trying to find a cash machine, we caught the ferry to Capri, where we did a lot of walking: up to Villa Jovis (Tiberius' villa), then around the coast, and then up 960-ish steps to Anacapri. These were a bit of a slog going up, but actually harder to go down, since the steps were irregular, and a bit too big for me. I managed to navigate them safely, only to fall over on an uneven tile on the flat bit at the bottom. My shin has turned into a very impressive bruise.
Angry weather threatening. It never came, but all day long, the dark cloud remained on this particular hill. It's probably Science.
Here is a very appropriate goat, just outside the Villa Jovis:
We paid for a boat trip around part of the island, which took in the Blue Grotto. In common, I think, with everyone else on the boat, we didn't fully understand what this meant. What this meant was that once we reached the outside of the lagoon, we were mobbed by chaps in rowing boats offering to take us into the grotto. This involved sitting on the floor of a tiny boat, squeezed in tight. "Lie down!" the boatman shouted, taking us fast towards a tiny opening, as we struggled to lie down in not nearly enough space to do so. Pellinor nearly got decapitated by the chain he dragged us in with.
He then rowed us around in darkness for about 1 minute, singing in the echo, while the other boatmen sang different songs. It was pitchy dark at first, and almost scary, crowded in the bottom of a boat while echoing voices sang all around you. But when you looked back over your shoulder, it was all shiny blue.
After about a minute, or even less, he took us out again and returned us to our boat. This all cost 13 Euros a person. And they say the Solent is the most expensive stretch of water in the world!
Here is Tiberius' villa from the ferry. (Or, rather, here is the rather more modern church that has been built on the highest point of the villa ruins.) I was particularly amused to see the notice at the top of Tiberius' cliff, reading (in Italian) "don't throw things over."
We ate in the hotel on about half the nights, since we got in late and tired, and it was easier than touring the streets of Sorrento. We were clearly Special in some way, since we got an extra glass of Prosecco and a extra little starter that very few other people got. We still don't know what we did!
On a couple of nights, we bought Limoncello to drink in our room. This was not, perhaps, wise. Nice, though!
Many of the hotel reviews on Tripadvisor waxed lyrical about the "egg lady" at breakfast. I only had eggses on two mornings, but I discovered her secret. We always aimed to have a big enough breakfast to avoid the need for anything more than a snack at lunch time, but on the two days I had Egg Lady's scrambled eggses, I remained not even the tiniest bit peckish all the way through to dinner time. Magic eggses, clearly.
We left yesterday morning, early - the hotel gave us a packed breakfast (minus magic eggses*), which was nice - and landed at about 12.30. England, we discovered, was hotter and sunnier than Naples had been all week. This shouldn't happen!
* No magic eggses for breakfast, but we stopped for a late lunch at a service station on the M25, where I had a magic carvery roll - an absolutely enormous one. It is now 20 hours later, and all I've eaten since then is a slice of toast, and I'm still not hungry.
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Date: 2014-05-20 11:22 am (UTC)