Herculaneum
Dec 11, 2025
Saturday, November 8
Another difficult night last night. Maybe too much caffeine, maybe just the cumulative effect of the noise and crowdedness of this city; the motorbike traffic is constant and unpredictable, and you really have to pay attention. We received my brother-in-law’s obituary in the evening, which certainly didn’t help with peaceful sleep. During the day, I had felt surrounded by male aggressiveness (the traffic, Roman imperialism) and by death –- room after room of artifacts from Pompeii, room after room of Roman portrait heads, evidence of people trying to make something that would last beyond their inevitable death. The news continues to be horrific and inescapable, and the loss of small pure consolations, like Manon, feels even harsher. The good news this week is that Mandani won the mayoral race in NYC, and Democrats swept other elections, which put the Republicans back on their heels. The shutdown continues; air traffic in the U.S. will be cut by 10%.
In any event, I slept for an hour and a half and then was up for three hours, feeling utterly miserable but trying to let J. sleep because he’s exhausted. I got up and was on the couch in the kitchen/living area, and he came out to find me around 4, and eventually I did fall asleep until 9. We may go to Herculaneum today. Rain is predicted, but not much.
View of Herculaneum with Vesuvius behind. The sea is behind me, maybe half a mile away.
8:00 pm.
We’ve returned from an epic trip to Herculaneum. The first challenge was figuring out the trains at Garibaldi Central Station, which we finally managed after walking in a circle for fifteen minutes. Once on the platform, we had to wait for the passage of the first train on our tracks, which was not ours, and wait for our own (unmarked) train, the “Circumvesuviana,” to appear in a few minutes, which it did, covered in graffiti. Nine stops later, we arrived at the present-day town of Ercolano, where we shared a pizza, quite a good one, at a little local restaurant before walking down the long hill to the sea and the archaeological park.
The little pointed tomatoes hanging from the ceiling of the restaurant where we ate lunch are typical of the Naples region. They’re hung up in the fall and last all winter.
The first view of Herculaneum as you approach the site, looking toward the sea; the city of Naples is on the far upper right on the other side of the Bay of Naples.
It’s almost strange to call this site the “ruins” of Herulaneum, because the state of preservation is so excellent and the work that’s been done to present the site so extensive that you don’t feel like you’re walking through ruins, but something much more akin to a real town, with real shops, houses, streets and seaside market. Looking down into the site, and then up at Vesuvius in the background, I felt moved almost to tears; what a terrible fate these people suffered! The feeling only increased as I walked through homes decorated with wall paintings, mosaic floors, courtyard fountains, and read that “over 300 residents stopped on the shore, awaiting the rescue coming from the sea, when the poisonous pyroclastic blast rolled down from the mountain at 1 am in the morning.” There would have been no chance of escape.
Loggia and garden of a large villa.
This building was a gathering place for the Augustans, or freed slaves.
In A.D. 79, the shore was right at the edge of the town; now it’s perhaps half a mile further out. So you can stand one what was the pier, where the boats would have come in, where the markets must have bustled and fishermen brought their fish. It was also where the residents waited to be rescued that terrible night. Jonathan walked further along the ancient quai than I did, and came upon the place where archaeologists have recently unearthed many skeletons. He saw them. I didn’t; it was enough to imagine what had happened.
At the same time, Herculaneum is extremely beautiful. The setting right next to the sea, but with the mountain above, is magnificent, and it’s easy to see why some of the wealthiest Romans had their villas here.
Daily life is also easy to imagine as you walk through the streets, paved with large stones and crowned to allow water to flow into the side drains, past taverns with domed bread ovens and large terracotta food pots still embedded in the lunch counters, past shops and craftsmen’s workrooms, and then enter people’s homes by walking on their own elaborate mosaic floors, and looking out into their gardens, or into their intimate atria and house shrines.
A house shrine with mosaic and painted decoration. Note the elaborate fresco fragment on the wall at upper left.
Evidence of Roman engineering is everywhere, and the high level of craftsmanship evident, as well as a gracefulness and elegance that must have been enjoyed by this class of Romans, at least. It’s clear from the (ongoing) excavation just how deep the town had been buried, which happened very rapidly, and you quickly see why the ash hardening into stone allowed so much to be preserved.
The reconstruction is not Disney-esque; it simply feels real. Because we were visiting in the off-season, not many other visitors were present. You are able to enter most of the structures on your own, simply asked not to touch the walls or lean or sit on the stones.
As a result, after a little while, you are really able to feel what it might have been like to live here. I had not been prepared to have their reality be so palpable to me, a visitor two millennia later, and I had not expected to feel so much empathy.
We stayed until the site closed at 5 pm, with the glow of the setting sun on the walls of Herculaneum, then the modern town, with Vesuvius in the distance.
We walked out of Herculaneum a different way than we had come, along the former seashore, past greenhouses covered with flapping plastic, and the sun setting over the sea in the distance, then on narrow winding streets up into the present-day town.
On the way back up the hill to the train station, we stopped for supper at a little trattoria run by an elderly man and his wife. It was early, and we were the only guests. J. had a salad with prosciutto, and I ordered zuppa di pesce, expecting fish soup, but what arrived was a bowl of delicious broth upon which rested a mound of mussel shells, tiny clams, calamari, shrimps, and fish, to be eaten with crusty sourdough bread (photo in this previous post.) During our meal, the proprietor started a fire in his wood-burning stone pizza oven at the back of the shop. Then he and his wife disappeared, leaving the restaurant with two other women, with whom there had been a constant high-volume conversation since we walked in. These two seemed unable to take our money when we wanted to leave. Finally, one of them took our 50-euro bill and the dinner check and walked out the door, presumably to a neighboring shop, returning a few minutes later with our change. Perhaps less has changed here than one might think.
We rode home on the train in the dark, and slept well.