Travel Diary - Have you Heard of Herculaneum?

Welcome to my first Travel Diary post. As you might know, I recently returned from a trip to Europe and one of the places we spent a few days in was Sorrento, Italy near Naples.

 Just to orient you, here's a map.

Sorrento is a beautiful hillside city filled with vineyards and orange groves, steep winding roads and crazy drivers. And scooters. Lots and lots of scooters. Apparently there are no traffic laws for scooter drivers. They can wind in and out of traffic and down the middle of lanes going in either direction. We even saw a scooter driver with his DOG sitting at his feet! I wonder how long it too him to teach the dog to do that.

for example

Cars in Europe tend to be smaller than the average car in North American, but in Italy, cars are tiny. Really, they all just wished they were scooters. A Volkswagen Bug (the new one), I spotted in a car park looked huge and fat amongst the others.

But this post is actually about the ancient town of Herculaneum. I'm assuming most of you have heard of Pompeii? Herculaneum is the more talented but over-looked younger brother.  Like Pompeii, Herculaneum was the victim of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius August 24,79AD.

There's the culprit.

Mt. Vesuvius had been dormant for close to 800 years and most people didn't even consider it a volcano anymore.

Imagine their surprise.

 Herculaneum is smaller and in better shape than Pompeii, with most of the buildings still having roofs and petrified timber beams.
This is due to the fact that Pompeii took the brunt of the ash fall with the initial eruption. It was once believed that all of the inhabitants of Herculaneum had escaped but excavations that began in 1982 led to the discovery of  three hundred skeletons near the sea, in boathouses and boats that didn't escape the intense heat.

DH and I. Notice the modern buildings built above Herculaneum in the back ground.

A main street. This shot also shows a modern apartment in the background looking down on Herculaneum. Can you imagine this as your patio view?

Interior of a single family home. The citizens of Herculaneum were quite well off. In fact, the teeth of the skeletal remains showed that they were well nourished, eating a variety of foods, and that  the average male was 6 feet tall.

wall art

Hard to believe that this bed is almost 2000 years old! Notice that the bedrooms didn't have windows. Odd.

More wall art. Apparently this is a fresco of Hercules. The room is part of the college which was also the headquarters of a popular cult.

Do these pillars make me look short?

A panorama view of Herculaneum I borrowed from the internet.

I hope you enjoyed this introductory overview of the ancient city of Herculaneum. Next week I`ll take you to the Isle of Capri!