Napoli and Ercolano

Our time in Tuscany over, we traveled almost four hours south to the Naples area.

What a world of difference!

In Siena, both in the city and in the countryside, we felt surrounded by beauty—natural and manmade.

Naples, on the other hand, feels squalid and ugly, and finding beauty often proves a difficult task.

The city possesses some handsome buildings and interesting architecture, but there seems to be little civic pride and anarchy too often triumphs over order and well-being. Many buildings and statues are covered with graffiti and garbage seems to go uncollected for days on end.

In our time in Tuscany, we almost invariably happened upon people who were open and helpful and who projected a sense of well-being and friendliness.

It was often the reverse in Naples. Few passers by meet your eye and not infrequently your Buon Giorno or Buona Sera is is greeted by stony silence and a hard stare.

Food and wine, which continuously offer a treat for the eye and palate in Tuscany, time and again failed to deliver in Naples. The wine at times proved almost undrinkable and the cuisine uninspiring. Even the pizza was pretty non-descript and ordinary.

True, we did have pleasant interactions with some Neapolitanos; our AirBnb hosts were kind and helpful and the folks in the bakery downstairs wanted to practice their English or help us with our Italian. In addition, they also served tasty croissants or "cornetas” as they are called in Italy.

The bar or coffee shop next door made great capuchino and served delicious gelato as well. So it was not all bad.

We did enjoy our visit to the archeological museum that is full of incredible treasures from antiquity, including a lot of art rescued from Pompeii an Herculaneum.

The Capella Sansevero is chock a block full of baroque sculpture, but photos are not allowed so you will need to go to the link to see what it looks like.

But a one day visit to the City of  Naples was all that we cared to make, leaving much left unexplored, perhaps. But we didn't have the appetite for more.

On our final day in the area, we opted to visit Herculaneum or Ercolano instead of the larger and more visited Pompeii.

For us it was a wise decision. It was a fifteen minute drive from our apartment, if you don't count the 30 minutes lost in Rosina, the modern town which surrounds the site.

Rosina is just as ugly and blighted as the rest of Naples, and we were happy to finally find the archeological site and parking area.

We opted to hire a local guide, who approached us in the ticket line, offering to give us a tour for 12 euros each, if he could form a group of 10 or more, which happened within five minutes or so.

He introduced himself as Paulo, and he proved a good guide, full of information about the history and art in the town that was buried by super-heated mud by the same eruption of Vesuvius  that destroyed Pompeii in 79 BC.




With Paulo's expert guidance we saw enough of Ercolano in  two hours to get a good idea of the life and times of the period and place.

Ercolano was a much more wealthy and exclusive town than Pompeii, so the houses there tended to be larger and nicer than their counterparts in Pompeii.

Pompeii covers a much wider area and would have involved much more walking, something we wanted to avoid. Ercolano can be absorbed in a shorter, more leisurely visit.

Many of the houses still have intact murals and mosaics whose colors and designs are nearly as vibrant beautiful as the day they were engulfed by Vesuvius’ power and fury.

We learned a lot, were not too tired, and were  intrigued enough by Paulo's excellent tour to want to learn more about Ancient Rome and the daily life of the Romans.


And it was a beautiful day, the crowds were much more manageable than we would have encountered in Pompeii, so we counted it as a perfect day sightseeing.

Herculaneum