Vintage View: Pompeii second to the intimate wonders of Heraculaneum
AWESTRUCK — the word comes over as jaded, commonplace aggrandising. However, I found myself dashing away tears on a visit to Pompeii’s less discovered, compact neighbour: The ancient city of Heraculaneum in the suburbs of Naples.
Ask any official Italian guide licensed to the Regione Campania (the official guides to the archaeology of the region), and the same phrase is offered with proud sincerity: “It’s our jewel.”
Approaching in the early morning allows us an almost solitary meeting with a 2,000-year-old community, ravaged by perhaps the most compelling natural disasters in recorded history — the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD. The level of preservation across four insulae (blocks) in Herculaneum, lined with single and even two-storey buildings of every private and public role, is breathtaking.
Nowhere else in the Roman world resonates with the soul like this place. Nowhere immerses visitors in the human experience of Roman life in the 1st century in the same way. At 9am, the high gossipy ring of house-sparrows and soft growl of courting collared doves, were our only company.
Unlike Pompeii, just 10 to 15 minutes by the jolting Circumvesuviana (train) to the south, the modern town of Ercolano built over the ancient settlement is an honest, heaving, authentic Italian spectacle. Brutalist flats chop the metres, edged with family bars, pavement pizza joints and hum-drum shopping.
There’s no feather-brained centurion to bring you to the gates of the excavations, no sprawling clatter of markets loaded with coral key rings and resin volcanoes to barter down. This journey from the battered WWII train stop of Ercolano Scavi to the gates of the old city is a short, traffic-pelted downhill walk.
It’s a welcome snapshot of the everyday round of Neapolitan suburban life, largely flattened in Pompeii’s desperation for seasonal profit. Your ears still buzzing with unscripted Italian voices, entering Herculaneum renders the silent streets even more spectral — a deserted suburb beneath a cliff of the present, chaotic town.
The density of volcanic ash and rock raining down on the 4,000-5,000 inhabitants of Herculaneum buried its streets, villas, monuments, workshops and harbour far deeper than Pompeii (a mere 4m). This allowed the organic materials lost in the larger city, including wood and bone, to be preserved and protected from looters. The discovery of a fine classical statue at the bottom of a well in 1709 led private owners to start exploring perilous tufaceous tunnels up to 20m underground.
Balconies, lintels, screens, sections of stairs and timber shutters can be seen all over the settlement. Furniture has survived in marble and wood, lightly charred or as entirely perfect in-the-paint condition. A cot was found to contain a baby. A servant’s bed hosted a napping caretaker. Shelves in one of the many bathhouses (thermae) sit waiting for the clothes of men and women going for a plunge and skin-scrape in a society consumed with the importance of hygiene.
Where Pompeii’s guides ask us to imagine the plaster covering stone and brick in the Forum, to conjure the marble finishes and classical furnishings of the villas in our minds, Herculaneum delivers this lost dimension. It’s the fabulous colour that sent me hurrying down over the limestone paving at 31c.
Walls, floors, ceilings, columns — sumptuous earthy tones, ochre yellows, brick reds, Mediterranean blues — even the fractured, faded, incomplete, polished concrete invites a touch, albeit quite rightly smacked away by with a sharp word from the guardian staff. Lean over a rope, prop your buttock on a tufa stone, and an urgent young Italian ricochets into sight.
Richly decorated, animated frescos and bold mosaic of nymphs, gods, and architectural ideals — one eye-watering wonder follows another house to house — a toe-curling peek through the curtains of time into real, ancient lives with their expectations and distractions.
Though streamed from aristocratic paterfamilias to slaves, the inhabitants of Herculaneum appeared to have lived fully, comfortably and well over their 700 years or so. It was a wealthy town, and it retains its outward flash some 2,000 years on, signalled by beautifully engineered pavements, lead pipes, indoor plumbing, gracious colonnades and formal gardens replanted in olive and pear trees still complete with their fine statuary. Multi-spectral X-ray imaging is currently being used to ‘read’ carbonised scrolls found in the town.
Highlights of the grid-work of streets of Herculaneum (and there are so many over a two-three hour walk) include: The House of Neptune and Amphitrite — a wine shop, the racks still loaded with large amphorae.
Cucuma’s Shop, which features its price range painted on the exterior. In the commercial areas look at the threshold groove where rolling doors would have pulled across the stone and integrated earthenware receptacles for ancient hot ‘fast’ food dished out from behind a bar.
The House of the Wooden Screen is celebrated for its separating wood partition (early zoning). Still completely intact, it added privacy to an area of the atrium with its impressive impluvium (open compluvium roof and collecting tank) —again, all in superb jaw-dropping condition edged in silken marble.
The Villa of the Papyri is the most extravagant of private spaces in the town, and once looked boldly out to the Bay of Naples (now a blank high face of rock). The ancient harbour, now far from the sea, includes boat arches where 300 men, women and children huddled before being cooked in a split-second by a pyroclastic heat surge from the eruption.
Only discovered in 1981, the skeletons, showing families and friends in their death throes, are far more affecting than the empty plaster casts of Pompeii to my mind.
Pompeii and Herculaneum, together with the sites at Torre Annunziata and Stabaiae, hold a special place in the development of modern archaeology from the 18th century forward. For a preview of a must-see visit to Herculaneum, try Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s The Other Pompeii: Life and Death in Herculaneum on BBC’s iPlayer or in a reasonable resolution on YouTube.
There are also several 4k recorded walks through the entire town also free on YouTube. Entrance is a mere €11 for adults (with a paper walking tour matched to numbers on the buildings) and is free to EU resident children and youths under 25.
Artifacts from Herculaneum can be found at the Naples Archaeological Museum. Return flights in July/August, from Dublin to Naples from €191 with Ryanair.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
