Goodbye to Sorrento

Monday 21st October

We only had a morning left, so we spent it seeing Sorrento by daylight - we've usually got up and gone somewhere in the morning, returned at 5 or 6 to rest, and only wandered the streets of Sorrento in the evening.

The main square of Sorrento is called Piazza Tasso, after the famous poet Torquato Tasso who was born in Sorrento in 1544. Mind you, he didn't live there much, he moved about a lot, between Naples, Urbino, Rome, Padua and Venice, and seems to have spent most of his life in Ferrara. His statue is in a corner of the square.



It's rather difficult to photograph, because it is heavily shaded by several large trees.

The main street of Sorrento, the Corso d'Italia, is largely built on a sort of flat shelf at the top of the cliffs. The hillside rises again on the side of the Corso opposite the sea. The width of the shelf varies on the side of the Corso facing the sea, but eventually the cliff falls steeply away to the marina, port and beach. We explored a few of the streets on the seaward side of the Corso d'Italia near our hotel to see if we could get any sea views, but there were precious few. Most sea views have been taken by expensive hotels. However, we did stop to appreciate the large area of orange and lemon trees, all with large fruit, though it was all still quite green.

The Piazza Tasso, the main square in the middle of the Corso, sits astride a huge chasm in the cliffs.



You may be able to see, in the bottom left of the photo, some of the stairs you have to climb down to get to the port. Perhaps you can appreciate why I wasn't keen to climb all that way up again when we returned from the trip to Capri.

On the edge of the Piazza is the Duomo, the main cathedral. It is in the Baroque style, though much of it is modern reproduction. I'm not sure about the ceiling.



It certainly looks old.

We walked from the Piazza Tasso towards the public gardens that fringe the cliffs, and found this rather attractive little cloister with a small garden at the centre; Paul would have stayed there all morning, it was cool and shady and empty of people.



However, we pressed on into the public gardens, which were full of red and white roses. Yes, roses in October. The gardens end at a lookout platform, where you can admire the beautiful Bay of Naples, with Vesuvius in the background.



There were three cruise ships in - one is outside my picture - as well as the four-masted schooner you may be able to see just to the right of the white cruise ship.

All too soon it was time to return to our hotel and collect our baggage ready for our trip to the airport. As we walked back, we passed a portico we had only seen before in the dark, so we had not noticed the wonderful trompe l'oeil paintings.



It used to a meeting place for the government in the 18th century, and had subsequently been taken over by the commune and dedicated to the use of the ordinary people of the town. You can see one of them reading his newspaper at a table.

We had a quick lunch while we waited for our bus, and then were soon on our way to the airport. Although it's only a two and a half hour flight, it seemed to take us the rest of the day to get home, where we finally arrived at around 9 o'clock at night. As soon as I arrived in Gatwick, I had to swap my sandals for shoes and socks and put on warmer trousers and a fleece. It was a bit of a contrast to the 24 C warmth in Sorrento!

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Pompeii Again

Sunday 20th October

This being our last full day in Sorrento, we decided to go back to Pompeii and try to see some of the things we had previously missed. It is such a big site, and even though so much of it is closed, there is still an awful lot to see - and on our previous visit we missed out things we had wanted to see, largely because I got such backache from standing about that we had to stop after four hours. This time, I managed five and a half hours, so we were able to see a bit more.

The first thing we had previously missed was the Temple of Apollo near the Forum, with this beautiful bronze statue of Apollo.


He is drawing his bow - which is currently missing, hence the slightly strange stance. There is also a figure of Diana opposite him, and near him, on top of a pillar, is the bottom half of a broken sundial. This is appropriate for a sun God! The main statue of him, which would have been in the centre of the temple, is missing.

At one edge of the forum were the granaries, which are currently closed with gates and used to house some of the finds from the site. This is the kind of random acculturation of finds in one of the granaries - amphorae, statues, staele, and odd ceramic items.



I loved the detail on the carving on the upper right of a little boy and a dog. There is no information about it, so I have no idea where it came from. And there's a very strangely shaped ceramic thing in the bottom right corner which I'd dearly like to know more about.

All over the town there are still the lead pipes that carried the water round the town. In each street there are public fountains, some of which still work.


This one has been disfigured by the addition of a very ugly modern tap. I don't know if it's drinking water or not, but people were drinking it and filling their water bottles. Paul just used it to wash his hands - we'd been covering ourselves with sun cream because it was really hot and we were getting burned.

Our next destination was the brothel, which was very crowded indeed. This was apparently the best organised brothel of the 25 or so found in Pompeii. Some were just little single rooms with a sign outside to indicate what they were, others were two or three little rooms behind or above taverns.

This one had 10 little rooms, 5 on each of the two floors. The upstairs isn't safe, so you can only go into the downstairs ones. Each little cubicle downstairs contained a sad little stone bed, on which a mattress would have been spread.



Each cubicle downstairs also had an erotic picture above the doorway, suggesting which position might be adopted. I did take photos of these, but obviously I'm not going to post them - though they are quite faint and hard to decipher anyway. There was also a toilet in an even tinier cubicle.

Apparently the rooms upstairs had wooden beds, so possibly those were slightly higher class. It was also suggested that upper class men did not frequent these brothels, they would have used their household slaves for sex or had prostitutes visit them in their houses.

Next we visited another bath house, the Stabian Baths, which were still being re-built after the earlier earthquake. When the eruption started, part of it was still a building site. It was obviously planned to be very smart indeed. There was a large and very elegant palaestra for exercise, and the frigidarium, which was also used as a changing room and had niches for the clothes, was highly decorated with both fresco and stucco. The tepidarium was complete, but the calidarium was still being built and you could see the hypocaust underneath the hot water baths. I won't post any photos though - I seem to have chosen lots of other bath photos in the past.

The next house was rather interesting because it had originally been called the Casa dei Quadretti Teatrali, (House of the Four Theatricals or something similar) because there were four theatrical frescos. Below is one of them.



However, it is now to be called the House of P. Casca Longus, though it wasn't really his house at all. The renaming is because it contains a marble table base with each leg formed as a lion's head descending to a paw. The inscription P Casca Long(us) on each lion head identifies the table as belonging to the Casca who was the first to strike down Julius Caesar in the Senate. After Caesar's death, Casca became Tribune of the People but later was exiled with Brutus to the East where he died at the Battle of Philippi. After his death, all his property was confiscated and sold, so the table was probably just bought by the rich owner of this house. I imagine it would be more logical to call it the House of the Table of P. Casca Longus.

The next building we visited was the laundry - called the Fullonica or Fullers. This was because new cloth was prepared and dyed there, as well as dirty clothes being washed. The laundry had been converted from what was originally a large house. After the earthquake of 63 AD (which preceded the eruption of 79 AD) many wealthy people abandoned their smart houses and left the area, so some houses were converted to a business use, and this seems to have been one of them. In this case, the impluvium was converted into a vat for washing cloth or laundry.


The roof of the house was used for drying the laundry, and at the back of the house are further vats and smaller containers for trampling the clothes in a mixture of water and soda or water and urine.

It is easy to see the original use of this building as a wealthy person's house because of the fine frescos; below is one of them.


It isn't exactly the sort of thing you expect to find in a laundry!

Very close to this is a house which was closed, and there was no information displayed about it on notices or on any map. But we could see through the doorway that there were many fine mosaics on the floor.



At the back, you can see the impluvium, and through the tablinum to the peristyle and a garden. This was one of the very frustrating things about this site. We have two slightly different maps, but neither seems to provide quite the correct information. I imagine this could be because theories about some of the buildings keep changing, and because many of the buildings have to be kept shut to preserve them.

The next building was a Thermopolium, or fast food shop. You can see that it is extremely smart, with an expensive marble counter top and some very fine frescos.


I suppose this could have been another example of a wealthy person's house becoming a business. One of the maps certainly calls it the House and Thermopolium of Vetutius Placidus.

By now my back was giving me a lot of pain, so we started to return to the site entrance and the railway station. On the way, we stopped at the House of the Dancing Faun, and this time, the sun being much lower, I got some decent photos of the faun at last.


The statue of the faun is on a plinth in the centre of the impluvium - but of course, the impluvium was probably no longer being used to collect household water, since piped water from the aqueducts was now available for those wealthy enough to pay for it. The owner of this house was certainly wealthy, the house was enormous.

We still hadn't seen a lot of houses we would have liked to see, but that was mostly because they were shut. We kept planning a route on the map, then not being able to follow it because a street was blocked off. We never managed to get to either the Theatre or the Amphitheatre because of closed areas. And many buildings were just shut, sometimes covered in scaffolding as well. We'll just have to come back in a few year's time!

We were back in our hotel before 6, and had time for a rest before going out to eat. This being our last night, we went to a nice Taverna recommended in the Rough Guide, and sat on the pavement in a tiny alleyway and ate the most delicious Saltimbocca Romana imaginable. It is a very warm night, so no jacket or shawl was necessary. We will certainly miss the warmth when we get back to Britain!




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Capri

Saturday 19th October
Goodness, it will be hard to choose photographs to post today, I have so many beautiful ones I have no idea how I can choose between them!

It seemed silly to be on Sorrento without going to Capri, and as Saturday was a fine day with little wind, it seemed a good day to go. It's quite a walk down to the Marina in Sorrento, as the town is built quite high above the sea, on cliffs. We walked down an awful lot of steps to the port, and I really wasn't looking forward to having to climb them again at the end of the day. We bought tickets for the Jetboat, which isn't cheap - just over €34 for a return ticket. It's €3 more if you buy two single tickets rather than a return, but if you buy a return, they specify a particular sailing, you get no choice. Fortunately, as it's low season, they aren't rigid about making you keep to your time - I daresay in the summer when it's crowded, you are obliged to return when they say. The number of seats on the boat is limited - and, unlike the bus, you can't stand.

The trip to Capri took about 35 minutes - it was a bit quicker on the way back. We took photos through the boat window as we approached the island, but as the windows were dirty, the photos are a bit blotchy.



This is one of the better ones, and shows the towering limestone cliffs which make up the island. It's another place where very little is flat. We landed at the Marina Grande, where all the boats arrive. Capri town is 150 metres above the port, and you can ascend by funicular, taxi or bus if you think the walk up the 300 steps is too much. We ascended by bus, as we had decided that, our time on the island being short, we would take a tour.

The little bus drove us through Capri and then towards Anacapri. which is 150 metres higher. Our guide, Luigi, told us that the word 'Ana' comes from a Greek word meaning 'above' - so it's just the town of 'Above Capri'.

The first people to arrive in Capri were the Phoenicians and Luigi told us they built the steps between Capri and Anacapri which, until the 20th century, remained the usual way for people to travel between Capri and Anacapri. I seem to remember, from reading 'The Story of San Michelle' about 50 years ago that Axel Munthe did the journey on a donkey. Perhaps that's how some of the Romans did it too - I can't imagine fat Roman senators obliged to visit the Emperor Tiberius having to walk up all those steps, I seem to remember reading there are hundreds of them. Lungi showed us the Phoenician steps as we drove past, but I wasn't quick enough to photograph them - it's the old story of narrow roads with nowhere for the bus to pull in.

We continued on, up little winding roads with hairpin bends that made us gasp and with some stupendous views.



That is Vesuvius away in the distance, looking more like a pimple on the horizon.

We drove through Anacapri and then started to descend towards the sea again, heading for the Blue Grotto, which is quite a distance, even from Anacapri. We were very happy we hadn't tried to walk all that way.

We eventually left the bus and walked down some sets of steps towards the entrance to the Blue Grotto, where you are taken in by a boatman in a rowing boat. You have to lie flat in the bottom of the boat because the long entrance tunnel is so low.



You lie right down with your head at the level of the sides of the boat, the boatman pushes as hard as he can with the oars to move the boat through the tunnel, then he gets down flat as well.


I say 'you' rather than 'I' because I just couldn't face it. Paul said the tunnel was probably only 15 or so yards long, but I'm afraid I couldn't even consider it - and after coming all that way! I had no idea the tunnel was so low, though I might have guessed something of the sort, since the grotto wasn't discovered until last century. You might guess that the two photos above are Paul's photos - I didn't even get as far as getting in the boat. The grotto is blue inside because of the reflected light that gets in through that tiny tunnel. Paul said wasn't very bright inside today, certainly his photos are a bit disappointing. I daresay in high summer the light is much stronger and it won't be quite so dark inside.

The bus took us back to Anacapri, which is not a very interesting town, where Luigi recommended us a restaurant for a very quick lunch, because I was desperate to visit the Villa San Michele; I've wanted to visit it for almost 50 years, ever since I read Axel Munthe's book 'The Story of San Michele'. Probably few people today have heard of Axel Munthe, so I'll explain by quoting a translation of the marble tablet outside his villa. It says 'Axel Munthe, 1857 - 1949, Swedish physician, author and humanist, helper of the poor, protector of animals, gave expression to his longing for beauty by building this house, which he dreamed of and created. In his book 'The Story of San Michele', he brought mankind his message of the eternal value of art.'

He began building the villa in 1896, after earning enough money by making a name for himself as a doctor in Rome. (He was appointed physician for Queen Victoria of Sweden.) He supervised the work himself, with local farmers supplying the labour. The nucleus of the villa was an existing house, onto which he built. Construction went on for many years, whenever his finances allowed and as his ideas developed. He didn't want to create a comfortable home, so much as one filled with light, and the house is just as beautiful as I knew it would be from reading the book.

In the vestibule is a copy of the 'Cave Canem' mosaic from Pompeii, and in the dining room a copy of the mosaic showing the skeleton with the wine jugs. I posted photos of both these when I wrote about our visit to the British Museum exhibition 'Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum' so I won't repeat them again. The dining room, a stark white room, is full of Renaissance furniture, and leads into the kitchen. No kitchen photos this time though - I'm far from sure I can post many photos on the hotel's Internet connection, so I'm limiting myself.

One of the most beautiful areas in the house is the small enclosed courtyard which I suppose corresponds to the Roman atrium. Like the rest of the house, it is full of antique fragments. The column that supports the arches came from a Roman villa in Capri. There are antique busts in the niches - the one on the left is Livia, wife of the Emperor Augustus.



The collection of rainwater used to be vital to Capri, on which there is no fresh water. The Romans used the impluvium to collect rainwater. The big container here is in memory of that, and dates from 500 BC.

The stairs you can see at the left of my photo lead up to a verandah and then the bedroom. The guide book points out that the furniture ranges in origin from the Renaissance to the 19th century, and once again it contains antique fragments.




This is a very big room and is divided into two parts - you can see part of the bed on the left but clearly the room could be used for work, and in line with Axel Munthe's desire for light, the room is illuminated by huge windows of antique glass.

There's also a study, with the head of Medusa that comes from a temple built by the Emperor Hadrian and a mosaic floor that uses marble from a Roman villa in Capri; that leads into two other rooms, and then the sculpture loggia.



There are far too many things in here to mention all of them. The table with the mosaic - it's not unlike the Cosmati pavement in Westminster Abbey - was discovered by Munthe in Palermo where it was being used for scrubbing laundry. The beautiful bronze statue at the back is a copy of The Resting Mercury' which was a gift from the city of Naples to Munthe in gratitude for his work there during the cholera epidemic in 1884.

The loggia becomes a pergola and then opens into a series of terraces with the most amazing panoramic views. This is the pergola, taken from the end opposite the sculpture loggia.




I'm afraid my son has a way to go - I posted a photo of the pergola he built for his house much earlier this year. It lacks the marble columns of this one, I'm afraid. It also lacks the view.



I would have stood for ages just drinking in this view, but time is always short on a tour and we mounted the terraces and wandered the garden. A narrow flight of steps leads to the upper area of the garden, where there are the remains of an Imperial Roman villa which Munthe had excavated. The remains are part of a bedroom (cubiculum) with a mosaic floor and frescos.

The other interesting building is what used to be a chapel. The chapel was built at some time in the Middle Ages on the remains of part of the Roman villa, and dedicated to the Archangel Michael (San Michele). It was burned down by pirates in 1535, and used as a gunpowder store during the Napoleonic wars. Munthe used it as a library and music room, and it is filled with antiques and works of art. Outside, looking over the panoramic view, is an Egyptian Sphinx which is more than 3200 years old. Popular local belief holds that, if you stroke its sides, your wishes will come true, but I only read that on the boat on the way back, so I neglected to stroke it, I'm afraid.

We would have spent longer in the garden too, but we needed to get back to the bus.



This is Paul, running through the garden to catch me up. We were very sorry to leave the villa, I could happily have stayed all afternoon appreciating all the beautiful things.

It was Henry James who encouraged Munthe to write about the villa and about his life and his beliefs. The first draft of the book may have been finished by 1899, but it wasn't published until 1929, immediately became a bestseller and has never been out of print since. It's really sad and ironic that, having built a house so dedicated to light, Munthe began to go blind because of too much exposure to light, and was not able to live in the villa after 1907.

We made it to the bus on time, and our next visit was the town of Capri, for a Lemoncello sample. We didn't buy any. In our bitter experience, it doesn't travel.

Capri town is nestled between two mountains and on such steep slopes, the houses are connected by winding hilly alleyways. The rather dinky main square, Piazza Umberto, is very crowded with visitors and café tables, and there is a maze of streets behind with smart shops. The views are good here too.




This is a view down from the street leading to Piazza Umberto.

All too soon it was 4 o'clock and we were back at the boat, feeling rather tired. When we arrived back in Sorrento, I didn't quite feel up to climbing the many steps back up to Sorrento town, so we took the lift which runs up inside the cliff.

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Amalfi Coast

Friday 18th October
I decided to give my back a day of rest by not standing about and trailing round ruins all day, so it seemed sensible to do the sightseeing sitting down in a bus. We weren't able to make an early start, as we had to make a phone call after 10 to arrange our transport back to the airport on Monday, and what with one thing and another, it was almost 10.30 when we set out. By the time we'd bought our tickets and found our stop, the 10.30 bus had left, but the 11 o'clock one was waiting at the stop and was almost full. We got on hastily and managed to get two seats together, but after that the bus filled up quickly and soon it was standing room only. In fact, the bus became so full it left early - clearly, this trip is much in demand.

I should perhaps explain that we took the public bus, not a tour. The road is so narrow a tour bus can't stop for photos anyway - though I daresay it might have driven slightly slower than our bus did. And tours cost €75 while the public bus costs €7.60. But photographs were difficult; the bus windows were not too clean, and because there were people standing in the aisle, there was no possibility of taking photos out of the other side of the bus. However, the views were still stupendous, even if the photos weren't great.

The bus climbed out of Sorrento and headed across the peninsula towards Positano. From the highest point on the peninsula, there was a view down to Sorrento, with the Bay of Naples behind and Vesuvius looming over everything in the misty distance.



That truly enormous cruise ship has been reduced to a bath toy.

The drive across the peninsula was fascinating because it passed through so many olive groves and we could see the olive harvest must be getting close. Many of the olive groves had their nets out already, though some were just in position and not spread out. The hillsides are so steep here that it seems the nets can't be pegged to the ground, so they are anchored to other tree trunks and to posts so they are more or less horizontal at about three feet off the highest ground; otherwise I daresay the olives would just roll off down the steep slopes. I did try to take photographs of this, but the bus went too fast!

The terrain is very rocky, and the road isn't very wide. As you can see, the cliffs rise sheer from the sea.



The bus drives along close to the cliff on one side, with a sheer 150 foot drop on the other side, and in places the road isn't any wider than about 20 feet. And you can see there isn't much of a barrier to prevent you going over. The bus can't manage the hairpin bends unless it drives on the wrong side of the road, which it is doing in the photo above.

We decided to miss Positano and go on to Amalfi, principally because Paul was worried that nothing in Positano seemed flat, the houses were all piled up one on top of another, in a way he described as insane. In fact, he felt the whole road was insane, especially when he saw the way people were driving - all very fast, and often on the wrong side of the road.

We passed through other villages, all very similar, with piled up houses in ice-cream colours, and deep blue morning glory, purple or rust-coloured bougainvillea and red or yellow hibiscus tumbling down the hillsides and draped over the fences.

Paul felt a bit happier when we reached Amalfi because we were then at sea level - even if the houses were still all piled up one on top of another.



Amalfi has a beach, though you have to pay to go onto part of it. However, we weren't there for sunbathing, so we got off the bus at the terminus and went into the town, which is just beyond the terminus. Big buses can't get into the town, the streets are far too narrow. Indeed after sitting lunching in the street we began to see a market for very narrow cars. The town is compete madness, with little twisty narrow streets with no pavements, fringed by tables full of people eating, pedestrians wandering slowly along and cars and motor scooters driving down them as well. I loved it! This is the rather bizarre fountain in the main square.




The chap on top of the fountain is St Andrew, patron saint of the town. He was crucified on an X shaped cross, which you can see behind him. I'm not quite sure where the mermaid comes into this story, but she is the figure down at water level, and yes, water is supposed to be flowing out of her breasts. There's also a rather strange Pan-like figure on the left, and neither of us could make out exactly what the weird-looking creature on the right actually was.

We ate our lunch quite close to this main square, at a little table in the street, which gave us the opportunity to admire the driving skills of the local population at close quarters. Then we wandered further up the street and in and out of quite a few shops. We stopped for ice-creams, and found they were far too large. We made the mistake of not asking the price first. Paul said, as we were eating them, that he was sorry he hadn't photographed them, he felt he wanted to remember what €10 worth of ice-cream looked like! Anyway, we sat at a different table in the street and watched the mayhem a bit more, before returning to the main square to see the Duomo.


We climbed up the steep flight of stairs to go into the building, which you can see has an almost gaudy facade of glazed bricks. This part of the building was started in 1100. The great bronze doors (below) come from Constantinople and are dated even earlier - 1066.



You can see that they are not currently in use, they're roped off and an official watches you carefully as you photograph them so you don't touch.

There's quite a bit to visit inside. There's a cloister, which is almost Arabic in feel, with pointed arches and palms in the central garden. It houses some early sarcophagi (2nd century) and some fragments of the ancient Byzantine pulpit that was originally in the cathedral, inlaid with mosaics, as well as some early frescos.

You go downstairs into the Basilica, whose origins are claimed to date from 596. It is now a museum, and has some quite interesting objects.


This is an 8th century wooden carving of the prophet Elijah. Steps from here lead into the heavily decorated Crypt, which houses the remains of St Andrew. His bones are buried under the altar. They were brought here (minus his head) from Constantinople by the Knights of Malta in 1204.

Upstairs is the cathedral itself, which is now largely baroque, as you can see.


The original church has now been completely concealed by the baroque decoration. The pillars have been faced with marble and the ceiling has large inset canvas paintings. The two granite pillars that support the apse come from the ruins at Paestum. The baptismal font, which you can't see, is made of porphyry and probably comes from the ruins of a Roman villa.

It had been my intention to go on up to Ravello, but Paul wasn't too keen on that idea, having had enough of twisty dangerous roads where he felt he was constantly about to plunge into the abyss. Also, when we looked at the timetables, we realised that we would end up getting back very late, so we decided to head back to Sorrento.

This is our final view of Amalfi. It really is a very pretty little harbour.



The trip back was, if anything, even more eventful. There was more traffic on the roads, and we met more buses and coaches coming the other way. There were several occasions when cars were obliged to reverse so our bus could round the corner on the wrong side of the road, and on one occasion, the only way our bus and the oncoming bus could get round the hairpin bend was by both driving on the wrong side of the road!

This is our final view of the Amalfi coast, as we climbed over the ridge before descending towards Sorrento.


We were back in the bus station in Sorrento by 10 past 5. I was slightly disappointed to have missed Ravello, but it would have meant we wouldn't have been back until 7 or so, and we were both quite tired enough by 5.

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Pompeii

Thursday 17th October
Our morning began with a visit to the police station, where we waited for a translator, and then were able to make a statement about the theft of Paul's wallet. We had by then heard from one of the banks about where an attempt had been made to use one of the cards, so we were able to provide these details too. Paul has lost a great many useful things from his wallet because, unlike me, he never takes things out that he won't need abroad; I've had the experience of being pick-pocketed before, so I am more careful. When we get back he'll have to spend time replacing things like his library card, free bus pass, National Trust card and so on. Fortunately, he didn't bring his driving license - it's being renewed at the minute, or he would have lost that too.

The visit to the police station didn't take as long as I had feared, and we were able to catch the 10.37 train which took us to Pompeii in about half an hour. The train was very full, so we had to stand, which was unfortunate as my back soon started to hurt. The entrance to the ruins is just outside the station, but almost the whole train gets off there, so there is quite a queue for tickets to get in. On this occasion, instead of the audio guide we took a walking tour, which was quite worthwhile.

You enter Pompeii through the Porta Marina, climbing up a steep slope, and are very soon in the ruins of the town's official buildings, the Forum and Basilica.



Dominating this area is the presence of Vesuvius. At the time, of course, it had not erupted for around 1000 years, so nobody knew it was a volcano.

Our tour guide told us that woollen material was also bleached in this area, and there were large tanks in the open space where it was soaked in urine to bleach it. The urine was collected in jars in public toilets, and apparently men were encouraged to use the toilets by being paid a small coin. She also told us that the emperor Vespasian decided to tax this business, so she said, for this reason, public toilets in Italy are still called Vespasiani!

At one side of the Forum you found the market, with different areas set aside for the goods to be sold.


I hadn't expected a market to be decorated with such fine frescos, though the main ones in my photograph don't seem to have a lot to do with market business. However, in the panels above there are some very faint illustrations of various foodstuffs. Apparently there was also, at one side, a tank for keeping live fish so you could choose your dinner while it was still swimming about.

Just at the bottom of my photo you may be able to see the top edges of two glass cases. These contain two of the plaster casts of the many bodies found in Pompeii. I couldn't quite bring myself to photograph them - one still had his teeth. The guide told us that more than 4000 bodies have been found, though only about 1000 plaster casts exist.

Outside the market we saw this helpful street sign.


The guide told us that Pompeii was a very cosmopolitan town, housing people of many different nationalities who might not speak or read Latin or Greek (for that matter, I imagine a lot of the indigenous population probably couldn't read either). So street signs had to be pictorial. This one was at a point in the road outside the market where carts were blocked by stones in the road. The sign was to let the cart drivers know that the cart had to be unloaded at that point and the produce carried inside - probably by slaves.

Our next visit was to the baths, where, once again I had to spent time sitting on one of the benches round the walls because my back was very painful. The shelves for the clothes in this one must have been wooden because they no longer existed, though you could see big holes in the plaster where they (or possibly wooden cupboards) had been fixed to the walls.

The next room was the cold bath - the frigidarium.


It was certainly big enough for quite a few people. It was so crowded I had to take a photo from close to, so I couldn't get all of it in the photo.

Next came the warm room, the tepidarium. There was a brazier here to keep the bathers warm.


This would have been in the centre of the room, surrounded by the benches that you can see; it is currently at one end of the room, behind bars, to keep it away from the tourists. The metal bars which surround it make it hard to see that along the walls are a series of recesses surrounded by figures of Atlas which support a frieze above. I didn't manage to include the frieze in this photograph, but at the top of it you can just see the lower parts of the Atlas figures.

The last room was the hot room, the calidarium. It has an apse at one end, at the centre of which is the labrum, for the water you used to wash yourself.



Apparently, at the other end was the hot water pool, but I couldn't see any sign of it!

Our next visit was to the House of the Tragic Poet, so called because of a mosaic of a theatrical rehearsal; we didn't see this - parts of the house were closed. We did see the really famous mosaic at the entrance, the one with the dog saying 'Cave Canem' but I couldn't take a photograph because the very bright sunlight and the very heavy shadows made photography impossible. I did manage to take a photo of the kitchen though. You have to imagine the frying pan I photographed yesterday being in use here.



What you can't see in this photograph, because it's behind me, is the lavatory.

Carrying on the food theme, we next visited the Bakery.


This was a large establishment. I managed to get one of the mills for grinding the corn into my photo, though there were four or five of them. The guide said the mills could be worked by slaves or animals, but I don't think there would have been room for animals in here. You can also see the large oven, as well as the counter for displaying the goods.

At that point, we had reached the end of the tour, and I was quite relieved because my back was agony by that time. There is a small snack bar on the site where I was able to rest for a while and have something to eat and drink before we set off again on our own.

Our first destination was the House of the Faun, where I hoped to get a better photo of the faun than the one I took yesterday in the museum. My luck was out however, the bright sun and dark shadows making good photos impossible. It was also impossible, for the same reason, to get a good photo of the huge mosaic of Alexander the Great defeating Darius. I had to be content with this pretty little mosaic, which was in the shade.




The House of the Faun is enormous, so we exited from the back and headed off to the Vettius House, another one I really wanted to see, as it is full of wall paintings. However, when we found it, it was unfortunately closed. We were able to look in at one of the doors and photograph one very famous painting just inside the entrance, showing (I quote a guide book) 'Priapus weighing his phallus'. This is, as you might imagine, a distinctly odd painting, Priapus being fully clothed, and the member in question which he is weighing with an old-fashioned balance, reaching his knees. Very peculiar, and not at all what I would choose to put in my entrance hall to welcome my guests!

My back was becoming painful again, and we had been wandering for more than three hours, so we decided to leave by way of the Villa of the Mysteries, so called from the frescos linked to the myth and worship of Dionysus. We set off down a very long road towards the Herculaneum gate.



This is typical of many of the streets in Pompeii; you can see the wheel ruts made by the carts over the years. The streets were often running with water, most likely waste water from houses, so the pavements were often very high as you can see, and there were stepping stones to help pedestrians stay dry shod as they crossed the street.

It was a long walk to the Herculaneum gate, and then a longer walk to the Villa, which was a major disappointment. Most of it was under renovation and we were not able to see the main frescos. We did get an impression of how huge the villa was though.

Once you leave, there's a walk of more than 600 metres back to the station, and my back did not appreciate the extra time spent on my feet. I was extremely glad to see the station, and fortunately the train appeared in a few minutes and I was lucky enough to get a seat.

I was disappointed not to see more of this huge site, but we have enough time to go back again in a day or two.

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Archeology Museum, Naples

Wednesday 16th October
As rain was predicted for today, and the streets were certainly very wet when we woke up, I decided we would be better going to a museum and staying dry, rather than visiting Pompeii and wandering about in the rain. We arrived at the station in good time to catch a train just after 10, but there was no train - I suppose rain must have stopped play. A train eventually arrived, but failed to leave until 10.40, so there were two trains worth of passengers and as a result it was more like a sardine can than a train! It quite reminded me of the London tube at rush hour. We were fortunate to get a seat, having been among those waiting longest.

In spite of the crush, a band got on the train - 2 accordion players, a saxophone and a double base - and launched into 'La Bamba', followed by 'When the Saints Come Marching In'. Sadly, there was no room for dancing in the aisle! Then one of the accordion players came round with the hat. They had probably adjusted their choice of music to the age of the average tourist, though they themselves weren't all that much younger. Anyway, it cheered up everybody who was waiting, especially those who hadn't got a seat.

We all cheered up even more when the train left, and the most delightful thing of all was to be inside the train when a huge thunderstorm started and the rain came down like stair rods. We were glad not to be still standing on the platform, we'd have been like drowned rats!

The journey took about 90 minutes, and once at Piazza Garibaldi in the centre of Naples, we had to catch a different line for just one stop, and then it was a few minute's walk to the museum.

The museum is large and crammed with objects, and there isn't much information in the way of maps and signs, so we just wandered. The ground floor houses huge statues from the Farnese collection of antiquities, many of them coming from the Baths of Caracalla. The most famous of these is the Farnese Bull.


This is the largest piece of classical sculpture ever found. The four main figures (the only ones from classical times) are all carved from a single piece of marble, and joined together with a carved rope. Apparently, Michelangelo had a plan, fortunately never fulfilled, to turn the group into a fountain in the Farnese gardens.

The mezzanine floor has the museum's collection of mosaics, many from Pompeii and Herculaneum, and a very large number from the House of the Faun in Pompeii. They are mostly remarkably preserved and full of life, some sparkling with glass tesserae. I liked the wildlife ones best



There is of course, the famous battle scene showing Alexander the Great defeating Darius, which I won't include because there are much better reproductions of it in all the books. However, there are many other highlights. This is obviously one by a well-know artist, because he's signed it in the top left corner.



It's one of the museum's highlights, and is called, not surprisingly, Three Musicians with Dwarf.

At the far end of this floor is the Gabinetto Segreto, which contains supposedly erotic material from brothels, bath houses and taverns in Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as a huge collection of laughable phallic lamps and similar things. Most of the so-called erotic paintings were not erotic at all, unless you consider naked people erotic. I must say, the people who decided these were not suitable for ladies to look at must have been very small minded. I can recall visiting Pompeii in 1962, and being told I wouldn't be able to view them - though it's so long ago, I can't remember whether it was because I'm female, or because I was only 19 at the time.



I was utterly delighted though with the object below, which is labelled a 'tintinabula', so I suppose it must originally have had bells on it - which is all it needs, really. Paul says it is in fact the concrete embodiment of the phrase 'I couldn't give a flying '.



On the next floor are the wall paintings, largely from villas in Pompeii and Herculaneum. These are highly coloured and some are quite exquisite.



I think this one gives a very good idea of how a Roman house was decorated. The walls were often brightly painted, but could include very delicate and refined panels, as there is in this room, or like the one below.



Some of them were more garish though - we can't all have refined and delicate tastes.



There is also a large collection of statues from the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum. This was a very rich villa, adorned with quite a collection of marble and bronze statues, like this drunken satyr.



The house also had a very large library of papyrus scrolls, hence the name.

There is also quite a collection of everyday and household objects from the many houses. I always love kitchens and bathrooms, and these wouldn't look out of place in my kitchen.




By this time it was after 4 and we were exhausted and both seemed to have attempted to take the entire museum home with us in our cameras. I can't get any more photos on this iPad, it's completely full and I keep having to delete things to make room for other things.

We made our way, via the metro, back to Piazza Garibaldi to catch the train back to Sorrento. Unfortunately, Paul had his pocket picked as we got on the train, which was very crowded, and he has lost his wallet. There wasn't a lot of money in it - and much of what there was, was mine. But he also lost his cards, so the entire train journey was enlivened by him shouting on various bank's helplines that, no, he couldn't give them the 16 digit number from his card, and no, he couldn't phone them back on the suggested 0845 number because he was in Italy. You'd think nobody ever went abroad and lost cards!

An hour and a half later, once we reached Sorrento, we went to report to the police. Unfortunately, this wasn't possible since by then it was 7pm and the translators had all gone home and the police don't speak foreign languages - reasonably enough, British police don't either. However, it means we have to go back after breakfast so we'll lose part of our day tomorrow.

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