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.