Naples and Herculaneum

In my list of things to look at while you're riding around in Calabria I forgot to include the dumping, the widespread piles of junk, trash, broken furniture, and general crap. It was easy to gloss over that when all else was so pretty and bucolic, but I was reminded of it last month by this New York Times article, Rome in Ruins, about the city's fraying infrastructure.

The NY Times article links to a report on quality of life in Italy that ranks 110 cities. Interesting to find Naples and all of our stops in Calabria in the bottom quarter of the list. I can easily believe it's easier to visit than to live there.

I haven't studied the Italian in that report closely enough to know if clotheslines detract from any city's official quality of life, but as a fan of air drying my own laundry I really liked its presence all over Naples. It could be hard to capture a street scene there without something flapping on a clothesline.

Our first day we walked the steep climb up from the city's old quarter...

to the Castel Sant'Elmo, which offers awesome views all around.

The site's elevation invites communications towers, however jarring the effect.

As if the views aren't enough, the castle is also a setting for some modern art.

Or perhaps the art is meant to distract from the less appealing towers.

The hands on that clock are knife blades, which makes an interesting impression right off. They become slightly unsettling when, instead of telling time, they occasionally swing around, fast, making several circuits one way and then back the other before settling into their resting position.

Is it art, or communication?

Another day we took the train from Naples to Herculaneum, the archeological site of an ancient town buried, like Pompeii, by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. The trains provide another setting for art, if maybe a bit less sanctioned.

In ancient Roman times, Herculaneum was smaller but wealthier than Pompeii. It is still a smaller excavation site today, much of it evidently lying under modern towns. (According to Wikipedia Vesuvius threw "a cloud of stones, ashes, and volcanic gasses to a height of 21 miles... ultimately releasing a hundred thousand times the thermal energy released by the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings.") 

One advantage of being there in November was having a quiet and cool day. 

Some of these spaces are impressively well preserved; having a guide helped bring some of the details to life.

The volcanic material buried Herculaneum in a way that, unlike in Pompeii, "carbonized and preserved wood, roofs, beds, doors, and food" (thx again, Wikipedia) and it is a bit spine-tingling to see the remains of a wood bed frame, or doors like these, charred but otherwise intact on their sliding framework:

The streets are not all that different from those in the older parts of Naples, with stone paving, narrow sidewalks, shopfronts--I liked imagining that probably back in the day there was plenty of laundry flapping overhead.

Roads and rides

Harlan and I found that even as we dug the rides and worked hard and happily our average speed was lower than at home. We could think of an array of reasons for that.

Calabria is much more mountainous than we expected, amounting to at least 1,000 feet of climbing every 10 miles. A fair bit of this climbing was on long steady ascents; out of Catanzaro we went uphill for a good couple of hours and could have made a meal of a couple more hours to get into the heights.

These next couple pictures are so much better wide that I'm posting them that way; you may want to scroll to the side a bit.

Plenty of the climbing is seriously steep, with a 10% grade coming as a welcome relief from stretches of 13-20%.

Descending such steep stuff, especially between switchbacks, doesn't let you recoup all that much average speed. Note the way the road here drops away a couple turns ahead:

Harlan's rear valve stem pulled away from the tube as hard braking on steep ramps caused the tire to slip on the rim.

Our speed was tempered a bit by wet November weather, but even when dry the road conditions are wildly variable, so that perfect pavement can change suddenly, often coming out of a tight turn, to broken and cracked, caved-in, or dirt.

The collapsed pavement in this shot, right at my rear wheel, is not unusual.

We may actually have been lucky in the weather, as there had clearly been storms sometime in the previous couple weeks with rain heavy enough to wash a lot of soil onto the roads. Mostly this was sandy, just tricky to ride through, but one ride involved several stops to clear mud out of the brakes.

There is plenty to look at, of course.

There are photogenic views in the villages, olive groves all around.

And ridge-top towns into the distance.

Truly impressive bridges:

Farms with cows, goats, sheep, usually at least one of these with a bell ringing for the full pastoral effect:

We see wind turbines at home, but you can ride right up to the base of these, no fencing or security around them as far as we could see, for a full dose of their size and drama.

Water towers range from mundane to graceful, some with attention to decorative detail.

There are the occasional castle ruins.

And you can almost get used to the classic town piazzas with clusters of older men talking things over.

We saw no women on road bikes, so I was an object of some curiosity, especially when we stopped for coffee at one of these bars, probably all the more because of my age. Here several of the men to the right in this picture are hanging around at least partly to look at me, just outside the bar to the left.

We felt lucky one day to get a look at mammatus clouds.

We had one particularly scenic ride from near Cosenza through rolling country to the hill town of Santa Severina.

There's a castle in the old center at the top.

You can get great views out over the country from the summit--this is another pano to scroll:

Santa Severina has an interesting maze-like garden/park next to the castle.

And at least four places to get coffee on the lovely piazza.

Traffic overall was very light once we were out of the town centers. Getting out could be pretty, um, interesting. This is a fairly typical view of traffic in Catanzaro--the taillights on in the dusk add to the drama, but the density wasn't unusual:

Harlan's rear camera captured some of what could be involved in negotiating these streets.

A word about Italian drivers, who, yes, seem to drive as fast as possible any time nothing appears to be in their way. What impresses us is how, if there is something--a bump or cyclist or slow vehicle or pedestrian or animal--they share the space. They don't seem to feel that anyone not in a car better just get out of the way. Forgive my perhaps rosy generalizations, but even on their narrow roads, at speed, we feel more comfortable than among American drivers.

Where at home a driver will tailgate to "send a message," we have the impression someone sitting on your rear bumper in Italy is looking for a chance to pass, not threatening you to pull over. The vibe lacks American drivers' fear and anger. In Naples we had a hair-raising taxi trip that we knew was a bit over the top when we saw the bus driver who nearly hit us head-on throw up his hands. Yet, when we stopped several cars back from some sort of snarl, our driver jumped out to walk up to the stalled car, pausing to talk cheerfully with another driver along the way, who joined him in walking forward, where they both chatted with the stuck driver, shared a round of laughter, then strolled back for a little wait as things unwound ahead. In the midst of all the crazy driving, no yelling, no cursing.

Cycling in the US, you worry most about whether cars and trucks coming from behind will pass too close to your elbow or too far over into the oncoming lane in blind turns. In Italy, riding or driving, you turn your attention forward, alert to oncoming motorists in your own lane. If you are approaching a hard right turn, you know that if a car emerges from the turn it will be partly on your side of the centerline. If you head into a hard left turn, you watch for a vehicle at least partly in your lane just beyond the apex of the turn. All this seems to work out as the Italian drivers dart quickly to where we Americans think they "should" be, you just have to allow a little bit of time/space for them to do that. We felt this was an acceptable tradeoff for not having to worry for our very existence on the road.

I should note, too, that we witnessed a hit-and-run collision, a grown man on a motorbike running into a teenage girl crossing the street with a group of friends. The man buzzed off after the briefest stop, as everyone nearby was rushing to the aid of the girl. She was not badly injured, but it was a reality check.

Lovely narrow roads are not confined to tight quarters in town.

We saw just a few other riders, maybe because of the season. We didn't expect to see any at all in Naples but a fair number of people ride there on mountain bikes, whether for the cobbles or the steep hills. I was impressed to see a Sunday group ride assembling inside the Galleria Umberto, a beautiful 19th-century arcade.

The Relive "videos" of a couple of our rides are sort of fun:

-- A loop from Scalea to Marmanno 

-- San Basile from Catanzaro