Snowbirds in Europe 2018

We’ve been home almost two weeks now. Memory fades, but luckily, I had Karen’s journal, and the date- and time-stamped photos to remind me where we went and what we saw. Warning: this is a long post.

Getting away from our place on Salita Petraio the last morning in Naples was not as bad as I feared, or as it could have been. There was the humping of bags up and down stairs, but we’d been building our stair- and hill-climbing muscles on this trip so it was at least possible to do it without injury. My big fear was that the cab our Airbnb host had booked for us wouldn’t come. But it did. It was even a little early; we waited only a few minutes on Via Palizzi.

Our cabby tried to drop us right at the off-site car rental lot at the airport. We were picking up the car we would drive for the next four days – to Pompeii first, then on to Salerno, and back. All the rental companies are at this off-site lot, even the biggies, but we didn’t know that. I was sure Hertz, which we’d rented from, would be at the terminal. It is at every other airport I’ve ever flown through. But not here. Our poor cabby didn’t have enough English, or I enough Italian, for me to understand this was what he was trying to tell us. I insisted he drop us at the terminal. From which we then had to take a shuttle bus to the rental lot.

A very cheerful young woman with excellent English processed our rental. She told me she’d taken her daughter to Pompeii a few years before. We should park in a private parking lot there, not on the street, she said. Car theft, and theft from cars, was common there. She also told us to watch out for feral dogs at the archaeological site. Interesting. The car was a Fiat Punto, a Civic-size hatchback, which I quite liked. We were able to put both our big bags and Karen’s carry-on into the hatch, mostly hidden by the parcel shelf. This was a good thing given we would have to leave our bags in the parked car today, and also on the last day after we left our Salerno apartment.

The drive to Pompeii was easy. We joined a motorway right out of the airport and followed the signs for Salerno. Getting off the motorway in Pompei (the correct spelling of the modern town's name) was also easy enough. I had imagined an underground, controlled-entry parking lot at the archaeological site, but the only one we found was an outdoor lot attached to a campground about 250 meters from Pompeii’s Marine Gate.

Karen and I had visited Pompeii in 1984. On that trip, we took the train from Naples after a week on Ischia. I remember a dusty road from the station to the Marine Gate, and a very makeshift entrance with a single guard/ticket taker. Given the way it looks today, with a substantial modern structure housing ticket booths, offices and toilets, and a state-of-the-art electronic entry system with turnstiles, this seems hard to believe. But a lot can change in 35 years, I guess. I also remember it as surprisingly uncrowded. Even on this off-season weekday in 2018, it was jammed.

Pompeii: Karen with friend, May 1984

In fact, the first glitch of the day was that they were fresh out of English-language guides to the site. This reminded Karen she had filched one from Salita Petraio (where a few had been left by previous guests). She’d forgotten to bring it from the car, though, so back we went to the parking lot. Could we find it? We could not. (It turned up later, exactly where she had thought it should be.) So we decided to rent audio guides. Without any other guide, we feared we’d not get much out of the visit.

My best advice to others planning a visit to Pompeii? Seek out Mary Beard’s excellent Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found, read it before you go, and then take it with you. I’m reading it now, and realizing how much I missed, and how much richer the experience could have been.

By this time it was a little before 11:30. We had communicated with Ralph and Pat a couple of days before. They’d flown into Naples, taken the train to Rome for a few days and then come back by train to Sorrento (other end of the Amalfi coast from Salerno), which they were using as a base to explore the Vesuvius area, Naples and Amalfi. We thought they might shore up with us in Naples at some point in our time there, but they’d apparently got our dates confused. They as it turned out were also planning a visit to Pompeii today, so we arranged to meet at one of the on-site restaurants.

Karen and I were barely onto the site, not even at the Forum yet, which is quite close to the Marine Gate, when I turned a corner and almost ran into Pat. Ralph appeared a few moments later. We ambled about together for a bit, into the Forum. At that point, Pat wisely decided they needed more detailed and reliable information than they were getting from their Frommer’s guide, or from us via the audio guides. She went back out to find something while we explored the Forum with Ralph. She returned with a book she’d bought from a hawker on the road. It was pretty, but turned out to be not very useful. They would eventually go back again and get an audio guide.

Pompeii Forum, Ralph Lutes at left

Pompeii Forum, Vesuvius in background

The Forum is impressive. This was the public centre of the community, the seat of government and the location of law courts and municipal offices. The audio guide seemed confusing, though, about which buildings exactly were which. The Forum is also surrounded by important temples and other public facilities. You enter it through triumphal arches, and it would have been decorated with statues and busts of emperors. Today, there’s not much left except low stubs of walls and broken columns. Most of the columns are missing their marble facing, only the brick cores remain. A very evocative modern bronze statue of a centaur sits in the centre.

Pompeii Forum

Temple of Vespasian, near Forum

Pompeii Forum, Vesuvius in background

My memories of Pompeii from 1984 were mostly of the small streets and houses where Karen and I wandered, as I remember, almost alone. Some of those houses had amphorae and even, in at least one case, plaster casts of victims displayed on the floors. These casts were first made in the 19th century by filling the cavities left in volcanic rock and debris by rotting organic material. Most of this stuff is now either in museums or in a gated storage area near the Forum. You can peer through the bars at the plaster casts and dusty rows of ceramic jars, but it’s not the same as seeing them in situ.

Pompeii 1984, amphorae displayed in ruins of house

Plaster cast of Pompeii victim in storage area near Forum

Pompeiian artifacts in storage area near Forum

We arranged to meet the Lutes at a restaurant near the Forum in 30 minutes, giving them time to go and rent an audio guide. While I was taking pictures just outside the Forum, Karen said she was just going to “walk up here,” meaning Via dell’Abbondanza, one of the town’s main drags. That was the last I saw of her for about half an hour.

View along Via Augustali near Forum (Karen in background)

Near Forum, view of unidentified temple

View of Forum through Memorial Arch

She somehow got caught up in a one-way path through one of the big mansions and had to take a long way around to get back. I cooled my heels for over 20 minutes, waiting for everybody to show up back at the restaurant, which they finally did about the same time. Ralph and Pat had also taken the opportunity to visit a couple of sites on their way back from picking up their audio guide, including the Forum Baths just up the street. Karen and I decided we’d do that one before lunch too.

Via Augustali - stairway to nowhere in ruined house

Unidentified shrine near Forum

Baths were another important public space. Only the super-rich had baths in their homes, so if you wanted to stay clean, this was where you went. Archaeologists say conditions would have been none too sanitary, though. They were elaborate places with rich decorations. Bathing was a three-step process – separate cold-water, lukewarm-water and hot-water pools – that required intricate plumbing to make it all work. The decorations, some still intact, are interesting, but it was difficult to imagine this as a place you’d want to spend much time. It seemed gloomy and cramped. And it was probably very smelly in the first century.

Forum Baths, caldarium

Forum Baths, frieze with racing horses around frigidarium pool

Forum Baths, tepidarium

Forum Baths, detail of decorations in tepidarium

Lunch was predictably expensive and not very good. We chatted with the Lutes for half an hour or so. They had been having a good time, it seemed. They’d already been on a bus tour along the Amalfi coast from Sorrento, liked Amalfi, not so much Positano, and couldn’t get to Ravello because of a landslide on the highway. They’d liked Rome, of course. Ralph wanted to go to Herculaneum as well as Pompeii, but that was undecided. It was a brief visit, then we headed off in different directions through the site.

Karen and I went off on the half-remembered path she had taken on her solo excursion. She’d seen one mansion with frescoes and mosaics still in place that she wanted me to see. She couldn’t really remember the route, though, so we wandered a bit. We did see some great things, including, eventually, the one she had seen earlier. It turned out to be the famous House of the Faun, which is marvelous.

House of the Faun, gardens

Pompeii 1984 - a very similar subject

House of the Faun, copy of famous statue in reception area pool

House of the Faun, gardens

I was struck too by the Thermopolia, the street-side food stalls, which I’d forgotten. They had counters open to the street with inset ceramic casks holding the foods on offer. I’ve since learned from the Mary Beard book that most Pompeiians would have had only rudimentary cooking facilities in their homes – in the case of poorer citizens, a single room in an apartment block, with at most a brazier. So they ate on the street much of the time.

Fresco in garden of unidentified house

Unidentified house - if you can't afford a real guard dog

Fresco in unidentified house

Thermopolium - Pompeiian fast-food restaurant

The afternoon, which was mostly sunny but cool and a bit breezy, seemed to get away from us. At one point, we realized we hadn’t seen some of the major sights, including the amphitheatre, where the gladiatorial combats happened, and the day was almost gone. So we set out on a long walk to get there.

Amphitheatre

Pompeii was destroyed in 79 CE (Christian Era – what we used to call AD, Anno Domini) –which was in the heyday of gladiators. There would have been man-against-man and man-against-animal contests in the Pompeii amphitheatre. Archaeologists have found advertisements painted on walls around the city advertising events. Beard writes about the occasion of an inter-city contest that ended in a pitched battle between fans from the two towns. The emperor in the end was petitioned for restitution to victims among visiting fans who were injured.

Amphitheatre, bleachers

By the time we’d had a very quick look at the Amphitheatre, we had to set off at a forced march back to the Marine Gate to ensure we returned our audio guides by the 5 p.m. deadline. People were streaming out now. We went back through the Forum and were struck by the different look of the place in the slanting last rays of the sun.

Near Marine Gate, modern bronze

Pompeii Forum

It was a good visit, but we weren’t anywhere near organized and methodical enough. We missed a lot. We should have read more before visiting. I’d like to say we won’t make that mistake again, but knowing us, we quite likely will.

It took us longer to get to Salerno than expected. We were relying still on our crappy freebie GPS, and the local signposting, which turned out to be atrocious. Our turn onto the motorway was completely unmarked so we disbelieved the GPS when it said to turn. As a result, we drove through Pompei at rush hour, the GPS, for some reason, deciding to take us to the next entrance onto the motorway rather than simply sending us back to the one we missed. It cost us at least a half hour.

It was dark by the time we reached Salerno. The GPS failed us again. It couldn’t find the parking garage where we were supposed to leave the car overnight. Our host had warned us she would have a problem letting us into the apartment between 6:30 and 8 – prior commitments, we assumed. It was almost 6:30 now. Meanwhile, the phone battery was dying, and I was getting not-very-helpful messages from her about how to find the place. It looked to us as though the street it was on, Via Duomo, in the heart of the historical district, was pedestrian only. It was certainly very narrow. In the end, I parked in a no-parking zone on a boulevard near the seafront, and ran up the street to meet our host’s “colleague” at the apartment. She meanwhile had gone off to the parking garage to see if we were there. Ay caramba!

It all worked out in the end, more or less. The street wasn’t pedestrian only, just traffic-restricted. Because we were staying there, we could get away with driving up it. The colleague finally came back to where I was waiting and explained this. I went down and got Karen and we walked up with our small bags, leaving the car parked. The woman let us into the apartment, showed us around, gave us directions to the parking garage. After she left, we drove up Via Duomo without difficulty. The garage was on a half-block-long dead-end street, so no wonder the GPS couldn’t find it. There was a sharp turn into it, then a steep ramp down, past an office, to a dark, cavernous-looking space. We had to stop at the office, pay the guy for the night – €25, yikes! – and leave the keys for him to park the car. We dragged our big bags back down to the apartment, stopping at a funny little independent grocery near the garage where we stocked up on essentials.

The apartment was small but okay, with a tiny, sparsely-equipped kitchen, a good-size bedroom with queen-size bed, wardrobe and chest, and a bathroom down the hall, past the front door. It also had three little Juliette balconies. Basic, but...okay – or that was our first impression. It was certainly in a great location, just down the street from the cathedral, in the middle of everything.

We went out later and found a quite a nice family restaurant, Osteria Nonna Maria. Good for people watching. A large family party came in while we were there, with kids, teenagers, young adults and old. The middle-aged ladies were dressed to the nines. Another party, a fashionably-dressed young couple, spent their entire time looking at their smartphones. We didn’t stay long. Karen was having some kind of migraine episode with upset stomach, and couldn’t eat. We got them to pack up her meal and took it with us. She was fine later, just exhausted, I think. It had been a long, tiring day.

The next day, we drove the Amalfitana, the corniche road along the Amalfi coast between Salerno and Sorrento. It was with some trepidation that we set out. The guidebooks spoke of it being a hazardous, nerve-wracking drive on too-narrow, switch-back roads.

The Bourbon King Ferdinand II commissioned the highway in the mid-19th century. The route was largely blasted out of cliffs overhanging the Tyrrhenian Sea, and completed in 1853. Our Lonely Planet guide calls it “a severe test of driving skill and courage, a white-knuckle 50 km ride that will pit you against the extraordinary ability of the local bus drivers.” John Steinbeck, writing in the 1950s, dryly observed it was “carefully designed to be a little narrower than two cars side by side.”

Stuff and nonsense! Maybe it was the training I’d had in our month of driving on narrow, switch-back roads in the mountains of Gran Canaria, or maybe it was the fact that this was the off-season – a lot of hotels and restaurants were closed – and the traffic was very light, but I found the driving not bad at all. Granted, you can’t drive very fast. Yes, there are switch-backs. You occasionally meet buses and lorries coming the other way, sometimes travelling too fast. But there is almost always room to easily pass. And the trouble is amply made up for by the spectacular views.

From Amalfi coast road: village near Salerno (seen in background)

From Amalfi coast road near Salerno: terraced lemon groves, mountains

It starts just west of Salerno. We stopped whenever we could to gawk. It’s too bad the weather wasn’t better. Sun and white puffy white clouds would have been ideal, but it was heavily overcast all day. We found ourselves in Amalfi before we knew it. In fact, we didn’t realize we were there until after we’d parked near the centre, taken some pictures from the harbour and continued on our way. Then we noticed the signpost as we were leaving town. We probably should have gone back and explored a bit, but we were enjoying just tootling along.

Amalfi town centre from pier

Amalfi: closed restaurant on east side from coast road

Amalfi: view from pier of west side

From Amalfi coast road: view of town of Maorie

We came to Positano sooner than expected too. We stopped there, parked in a lot near the top and walked a long way down a steep, winding, one-way street to the centre. Pat and Ralph didn’t seem to think much of Positano. I thought it charming enough and certainly picturesque. We walked right down to the tiny beach and found a predictably over-priced, mediocre restaurant for lunch. I had pizza, which I later regretted (injury added to the insult of inflated prices). Karen had, I think, a dish with the ubiquitous pounded-flat veal.

Positano from Amalfi coast road

Unidentified village east of Positano from Amalfi coast road

Positano: beach and town from road above

We explored a bit in the centre, checked out the church (not inspiring). We window-shopped the fashion boutiques on the fly. Somewhat surprisingly, they seemed to be selling mostly locally- or at least Italian-made goods. Several small art galleries appeared to have quite sophisticated work, definitely not the usual beach resort kitsch. This is a very wealthy part of the world. Many of the shops and restaurants were closed for the season, though.

Positano: terrace of hotel closed for the season

Positano from beacb

Positano from road above

We would drive no further west. It was already after three by the time we got to the car. We did decide to drive to Ravello before heading back to Salerno, though. It’s about five kilometers up the slopes of the Latteri mountains from the coast, just east of Amalfi.

Ravello: view to east along coast

Ravello is a reputed beauty spot with some moderately interesting stuff to see, if you have time. We didn’t. It was after four by the time we got there. We wandered over to the place where the best views of the coast appeared to be – that’s one of the things Ravello is known for – but weren’t overly impressed. They were no better than the views from the coast road to my eye. The cathedral was closed by the time we came back to it. It was too late to the start on the 13th-century Villa Rufolo, which is open as a museum, and apparently has more nice views. There are some pretty little alleyways with interesting shops in the historic centre, but most of the shops were closed for the season or the day. We could easily have been skipped Ravello, we decided.

Ravello: old town

Ravello: village below

We were back in Salerno before six, with the car tucked away for the night – and for the next day and night, as we planned to ‘do’ Salerno tomorrow. We went out for a brief walk and shop at a nearby Carrefour Express, then settled in for an evening of laziness and light snacking.

This is when the place started to piss me off. Karen had had a shower in the morning and reported that the water ran cold or lukewarm. When we were in for the evening, we noticed that the radiators were now no longer working, and when I tried the shower, I couldn’t get even lukewarm water. I emailed our host, but didn’t immediately hear back. Later, I tried the shower again – in fact, had a shower, which was cold. Our host eventually responded and predictably said nothing could be done that night, but she would get someone to look at it the next day.

There were more emails back and forth the next day, when we were in and out between sightseeing excursions. At one point, when we’d had no satisfactory response from her, I wrote and said I thought it was unacceptable, that she should offer us a partial refund. That may have pricked her into action because the next we heard, a technician had come while we were out, diagnosed the problem as a dead circuit board in the heating system – which apparently controlled both the hot water tank and the radiators – and replaced it. When we returned late in the day, everything was fixed: heat in the rads, hot water in the shower. Still, we’d had no working shower for two of three nights of our stay, and no heat one night. Our host wouldn't hear of offering compensation, though. I thought of taking it up with Airbnb, but decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. We were leaving the next morning.

In the meantime, we’d had quite a nice day in Salerno. It’s not a city I’d rush back to or recommend highly, but it has a few interesting things to see, which we did – and, inevitably, some we didn’t see.

In the morning, we went for a walk through the historic quarter and into the commercial centre, mainly in search of a bank machine, but also to have a look around. At one point, we tried to go into a Banca d’Italia building, thinking there might be an ATM there. There were armed guards at the door who politely explained there was no ATM and pointed us down the street to where there was one. I’m guessing this was offices of the equivalent to our Bank of Canada, not a retail bank.

Once we were flush with cash again, we strolled up and down the narrow, mostly pedestrian-only streets of the medieval city. At one point, I bought a scarf on sale for €6 at a little men’s fashion boutique. We walked right down to the the lungomare, the seafront, and along a wide promenade. It was partly sunny and mild so there were a few people out promenading, despite the time of day. They’d be pensioners, unemployed people and office workers on coffee breaks, I’d guess. Not many tourists. A small crowd chatting and smoking at a little beach at one end, at Piazza della Libertà, may have been government workers from the nearby offices of the finance department and port authority.

We walked back up Via Duomo to the Church of San Giorgio. Part of a monastic complex in the 16th century, later dissolved during the reunification, it didn’t look like much on the outside. We’d read about it somewhere as worth a visit, though. I’m not sure where, since the Lonely Planet Naples, Pompeii & The Amalfi Coast guide doesn’t even mention it. It was definitely worth a visit. It has some lovely frescoes, including in the choir vault and dome, by Angelo Solimena, a notable Neapolitan artist of the baroque era. They are impressive, but my eye was caught by a series of full-length portraits of saints. There’s something about their faces, especially the startled look of Saint Francis of Paola, the 15th century founder of the Minim monastic order. I’m not clear who the artist was, possibly Francesco Solimena, son of Angelo.

Church of San Giorgio, Salerno, fresco by Angelo Solimena

Church of San Giorgio, Salerno, frescoes by Angelo Solimena

Church of San Giorgio, Salerno, San Francisco di Paolo

Church of San Giorgio, Salerno, frescoes

We went on from there up the street to the Duomo, St. Matthews Cathedral. It was begun in 1076 and consecrated in 1084 – unusually quick construction, I would have thought, given that many medieval cathedrals were built over decades. It has a perhaps over-inflated reputation. Lonely Planet says it’s “widely considered to be the most beautiful medieval church in Italy.” Widely considered by whom, I wonder? Citizens of Salerno? It is oddly impressive, though.

Salerno, Cathedral of St. Matthew, courtyard

Beyond the baroque street front, there’s an unusual courtyard with tombs of 12th century bishops. They were buried in re-purposed ancient Roman stone sarcophagi, with lids carved much later in the middle ages. Some of the niches also have frescoes, mostly faded now – not surprising given the courtyard is open to the elements overhead. The juxtaposition of relatively crudely carved medieval lids and expertly and ornately carved Roman coffins would seem to say something about what was lost during the ‘Dark Ages.’

Salerno, Cathedral of St. Matthew, repurposed Roman sarcophagus

The church itself, which was extensively renovated in baroque style in the 18th century, and then returned as close as possible to its original form in the 20th, is at first not very impressive. Then you start to notice the beautiful medieval mosaic work. I particularly liked the geometric mosaic decorations on the pulpits and pillars near the altar. The gilt mosaic murals over the main altar and one side chapel are also lovely – though not as impressive as similar work we’ve seen in other Italian churches, I thought.

Salerno, Cathedral of St. Matthew, mosaic over main altar

Salerno, Cathedral of St. Matthew, nave

Salerno, Cathedral of St. Matthew, pulpit

Salerno, Cathedral of St. Matthew

Salerno, Cathedral of St. Matthew, pulpit

Salerno, Cathedral of St. Matthew, inlaid mosaic pillar

We went home – just down the street – for lunch, then came out again in the afternoon and walked up to Giardino delia Minerva, which we very much enjoyed. The weather was cool, mostly overcast, and a bit muggy, but at least it wasn’t raining.

Salerno, Palazzo Ruggi D'Aragona (now apartments), baroque fountain

As we walked up to the garden, we came to a place in a narrow street where service vehicles were being forced to back, very slowly, a long way out. Police vehicles had come from the other direction, further up the hill and needed to get out. Somebody, I reckon, was going the wrong way on a one-way street. I’m guessing it was the cops. A little further up, more cops on foot were milling in the street, conferring. One was investigating a boarded-up, abandoned building – there appeared to be more than one in the vicinity. Maybe somebody had been trying to break into it, or had gotten in, and a neighbour reported it. Who knows?

Salerno, Garden of Minerva, baroque entrance portal

The Minerva Garden is an unusual place. It was a garden from at least the 12th century, right in the heart of the old city. Salerno was an important centre of medical research and treatment in the middle ages. In the 14th century, a scion of the family that owned the property, Matteo Silvatico, a scientist, teacher and physician, created the garden to grow and study medicinal plants or “simples.” According to the literature provided at the site, it was “a forerunner of all future botanical gardens in Europe.” Silvatico used it for research that eventually resulted in his influential lexicon of plant-based medicines, completed in 1317.

Salerno, Garden of Minerva

The garden is built on four levels up the side of a hill, with a gravity-fed irrigation system from a natural spring. The site was in ruins until the last part of the last century when restoration work began. It has been planted now with the same kinds of plants that historians know were there in medieval times, even organized in plots in similar ways. Medicine in those days was based on the cockamamie notion of “humours,” the idea that diseases were caused by imbalances of four essential bodily fluids: blood, yellow bile, phlegm and black bile. Medieval physicians sought remedies that would balance the four. The garden is laid out with plants organized by their supposed function in this re-balancing. Bizarre.

Salerno, Garden of Minerva, looking east, budding fruit tree

Salerno, Garden of Minerva, stairs between levels

Salerno, Garden of Minerva

The place has a look of great age, although much of the infrastructure dates from later than the middle ages. There are also great views out over the commercial port and down the coast. We spent over an hour, clambering about the surprisingly compact garden and looking at the excellent interpretive displays in the small museum inside the main building.

Salerno, Garden of Minerva

And then we we wandered some more in the historic quarter, before heading back to the flat for an evening of packing and resting up.

Salerno, fountain in Piazza Abate Conforti

The next morning, we brought all the luggage down to the building lobby. Karen waited with it while I walked up and got the car and drove around and back up Via Duomo. I stopped at a wide spot in the street just up from the flat and we loaded our luggage quickly before any other vehicles came. The GPS – surprise! – guided us flawlessly out to the motorway, and we were off.

We were headed ultimately back to the airport at Naples to drop the car and stay in a hotel overnight before our flight to London Gatwick the next morning. But in the meantime, we had most of the day to fill. We had thought about going to Herculaneum, but couldn’t face another big, complicated site, possibly overrun with tourists. We chose instead the Villa Poppaea at Oplontis, which was destroyed in the same 79 CE eruption.

Bust of Poppaea at National Roman Museum, Rome

Poppaea was a seaside villa – although now no longer at the seaside because of changes in water levels. It was possibly owned by the emperor Nero’s second wife, Poppaea. Hence its modern name. She was known for taking baths in ass’s milk apparently – and for being kicked to death while pregnant by her husband. Pleasant. Ass’s or donkey’s milk, including “artificial” donkey’s milk, I learn, are still sold as beauty treatments. Whether the woman actually ever lived here is entirely unproven.

Villa Poppaea, Oplontis: colonnaded walkway on land side

The villa is near the centre of the modern town of Torre Annunziata. When we arrived, I don’t think there were any other visitors there, although some came before we left, including one school group. I pulled up on the street beside it. Keeping in mind what the Hertz lady had said about parking at Pompeii, I ran in to ask the staff if it was safe to leave the car there. The very friendly ticket taker first said it was fine, that there had been no incidents for years, but then asked if we were leaving stuff in the car. When I said yes, she asked me to wait and went and talked to a security guard. She came back and said we could park right in the grounds behind a locked gate. We had to drive half a block the wrong way on a one-way street to get in, but it was worth it for the peace of mind when the automatic gate closed.

Villa Poppaea, Oplontis

Villa Poppaea, Oplontis: gardens on sea side

The villa deserves to be seen more than it apparently is. It must have been a lovely place before it was destroyed: large, rambling, with a huge pool. You get to the archaeological site by walking down a ramp from the entrance. The ruins are about 25 or 30 feet below modern ground level – as is Pompeii, of course, but it’s less obvious there. They’ve planted flowering fruit trees along the land side. There are colonnaded walks all around.

Villa Poppaea, Oplontis: main reception area with shallow pool

Inside, it’s stunning, with room after room frescoed from floor to ceiling on all four walls. Some of the frescoes are badly damaged but many are still surprisingly vibrant, and there is more of the walls surviving or restored than in most Pompeii houses. We explored for an hour or more.

Villa Poppaea, Oplontis

Villa Poppaea, Oplontis: main reception area with shallow pool

Villa Poppaea, Oplontis

Once again, they didn’t have any English guides left so we had to struggle with Spanish, missing a lot as a result. It diminishes the value of these places when you can’t really understand what’s there. The English-language guide is part of what we’re paying for. I feel like we shouldn’t have had to pay as much. How difficult is it, anyway, to estimate the demand for guides in English? It has to be more than other languages, including Italian, I would guess, given that English is lingua franca for speakers of languages for which guides are never available. Is this some Brexit pay-back, I wonder?

Villa Poppaea, Oplontis

Villa Poppaea, Oplontis: impressions in volcanic rock of wooden doors

Villa Poppaea, Oplontis

Our next stop, last stop, was Boscoreale, site of another country villa destroyed in the 79 eruption. This one is not open to the public, although you can look down at the partially restored ruins. There is also a small museum here, an “antiquarium,” with artifacts from Pompeii and Herculaneum. We had it almost to ourselves. I was particularly struck by the Roman glass, had forgotten or not known that the ancients had blown glass technology. Some of the vessels looked almost identical to ones we still use.

Boscoreale Antiquarium: 1st century CE Roman glass

There were also a couple of plaster casts, including one of a dog, probably a guard dog, archaeologists surmise. It had been left tethered by its owners and appears to have died in agony, still chained at its post. Lots of pottery, some interesting public statues and some very fine restored floor mosaics. It was worth the short hop from Oplontis.

Boscoreale Antiquarium: floor mosaic from Herculaneum

Boscoreale Antiquarium: floor mosaics from Herculaneum

Boscoreale Antiquarium: human-headed beast

Boscoreale Antiquarium: plaster cast of dog killed in Pompeii

The entrance to the motorway was a few minutes away. We were at our airport hotel, the Millennium Gold, by mid-afternoon, despite the horrendous Sunday traffic jam on the road leading to the terminal. The hotel was nothing luxurious, a businessman’s dormitory by the look of it, but it was fine. We checked in, returned the car, getting stuck in traffic again, and walked the ten minutes back to the hotel in light rain. We settled in, rested for awhile, then went out by cab to the airport to get something to eat. It was raining hard by this time. The selection of eateries at Naples International Airport is woeful compared to other big-city airports – the terminal is in general woeful – but we found a place with a two-course lunch special at a reasonable price. We left satisfied, and cabbed it back to the hotel.

Our flight left more or less on time late the next morning. We arrived at our Gatwick hotel, the Hampton by Hilton – right at the North Terminal where we landed – a half-hour before the 3 p.m. check-in time. The room was fine. It was dark, quiet, the beds were comfortable, and it wasn’t too expensive – CAD$168 through Booking.com. We’d stay there again. We had an early dinner at one of the Sofitel restaurants on the other side of the terminal, then connected our Apple TV to the room television and watched one of our Netflix programs. High-tech travellers, we are.

Our flight home was at noon the next day. I scored a couple of bottles of single malt at the Duty Free. Glenmorangie is still on sale for £34 (about $63) a liter. It costs $72.10 for a 750 ml bottle at the LCBO. I also bought a 750 ml bottle of The Orcadian a Scapa single malt for £32 ($60). I’d never heard of it, but they offered me a sample – actually, samples of both Glenmorangie and the Scapa so I could compare – and I liked it a lot. That particular bottle is not available here, but other Scapas at the LCBO sell for above $80 for a 750 ml bottle. So, bargain shopping at the airport. Who would have thunk?

We arrived in Toronto on schedule, about 3 p.m. and got out of the baggage/customs hall in record time. At this point, we were looking at a six-hour wait for our 10 p.m. Westjet connection to London. We thought about buying a few hours in a lounge, which would have cost us a little over $100. Then Karen suggested we check and see if there was a Robert Q leaving soon and how much it would cost. There was one leaving in 20 minutes, we got on it, and it only cost a little more than we would have spent for lounge access. We were in London by 6:30. Mike Haas kindly picked us up from the Robert Q terminal and we were home before 7:30. Karen found some frozen food for dinner, and we were unpacked and in bed before our flight would have left Toronto.

So ended our trip.

Sunday, April 8, 2018

The End

The End

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