It's worth planning ahead to fit this Neapolitan trio of blockbusters in one day of opulent sightseeing

Naples could easily occupy the ambitious sightseer for a fortnight without ever dipping in to secondary sites. It is a cultural blockbuster. Reality is, you don’t even need to pay admission fees to drink in the glories of Naples. Grab a spritz (Aperol? Limoncello? Maradona?), sit at a cafe table and watch the street life. Meander aimlessly and soak up the architecture. Pop in to any of a multitude of free, open churches to gawp at polished, gilded magnificence. Shop your way up Spaccanapoli, nickname for the street that splits the historic district and is the tourist “main drag”. You don’t need to plan ahead in Naples to have a great time.

However ... there are three exceptions to that rule in the town centre. These attractions are so popular that you really should organise your approach, pre-booking tickets where you can and building your itinerary around them.

The first, and the one almost guaranteed to sell out if you don’t book at least two weeks before you arrive in Naples, is the Sansevero Chapel. To be honest, I was sceptical. This wasn’t in my art history textbook. I’d never heard of the artists involved. I can’t remember anyone even mentioning it when I visited the city 20 years ago. Now, thanks to social media ratings, this Rococo chapel with its statue of The Veiled Christ seems to top every Naples visitor’s bucket list.

Every so often, the vox populi is right. Sansevero is a blockbuster well worth the advance booking and the queuing; both necessary because it’s quite a small place. Yes, Giuseppe Sanmartino’s life-sized sculpture of the dead Christ under a diaphanous shroud is a virtuoso act of marble carving that deserves its acclaim. Most visitors circle it multiple times to drink in its glory. I hadn’t realised, however, it’s just one of a whole sculptural cycle. Several of these are equally flamboyant, showing off different sculptors’ abilities to capture flesh beneath thin draperies or the human body entwined in a fishing net. This is a mortuary temple, and most of these figures are monuments to the Princes of Sansevero and their nearest and dearest. 

Most of what you see here dates to the mid-1700s and represents a zenith of Italian Rococo. There are 28 different sculptures packed into the room, set against a background of multi-coloured marbles, multi-layered moulding and a multi-arched roof. I don’t think there’s an unembellished square meter in the whole place. If your eyes get bored, you can put your brain to work puzzling out the Masonic messages that the commissioning Prince had integrated into the decor. It’s a shame the 18th century music being piped into the place wasn’t The Magic Flute, just to drive home the mystical Masonic vibes. 

You’ll be on sensory overload as you leave through a side door … but the Sanseveros aren’t finished playing with you. As was the fashion of the day, the Prince also dabbled in both science and alchemy, and in the crypt you’re greeted by two gruesome but fascinating life-sized skeletons covered with a perfect representation of veins and arteries. The Prince had such a reputation as a wizard that for centuries it was rumoured they were real bodies, and that he’d made his subjects drink some fiendish potion that hardened and preserved their circulatory systems. Modern testing shows the figures are real skeletons enhanced with wire, wax and silk, but the knowledge doesn’t make them any less frightening. Kids will think this is the best thing in Naples. (After the pizza.)

I’m not kidding about booking in advance. I didn’t even see signs of on-site ticket sales. Be ready for entry with your pre-paid QR code (tickets are €10), or you’re not getting in.

The cloisters of Santa Chiara are another religious site in the historic centre, but they will conjure entirely different emotions. Where the Sansevero chapel is bombast, sensual assault and magnificence, this enclosed garden … still used by the same order of nuns who built it … is a rare patch of peace and quiet in this frenetic city. It’s worth the €7 entry fee just for the soothing pause in your day. You don’t have to pre-book, but you will need to queue. It’s so big inside, however, that the crowd you waited with melts away. I suspect many people pop in, take the requisite photos and leave, but there are ample places to sit and simply enjoy the atmosphere. The best spot, on a sunny day, is a little pavilion with fountains and benches in it about a third of the way around from where you enter.

Santa Chiara draws the crowds because of its extraordinary majolica tiles. (Top photo) Fanciful scenes and writhing vegetation in blues, yellows and greens cover arcades of octagonal columns and the benches between them. These form two avenues that cut across the square garden with a broad, octagonal meeting point at the centre. Few of the scenes on the tiles are particularly religious. There are hunting parties, trading ships putting into harbour, and mythological processions. When we do get a nun popping up, she’s feeding cats. The first mad cat lady in art?

The tiles were painted and installed at about the same time the Sanseveros were building their chapel, but the overall effect is very different. This is possibly because there are big squares of serene garden to break up the decorations. Or perhaps because the covered walkway around the outside of the square is frescoed with older, gentle religious scenes, now much faded. There’s a particularly wonderful depiction of Saint Francis shaking a large hound’s paw that is my favourite depiction of the patron of animals anywhere. Off to one side of the cloister you can also pop in to see the nuns’ presepe, or nativity scene, which has to be one of the most magnificent in Naples. (I’ll return to this in an upcoming article on presepe.)

The third site, perhaps only worth putting on your agenda if you’re an opera fan, is the Teatro San Carlo. This is the oldest continuously operating opera house in the world and, as such, was the template for pretty much every opera venue that followed until the late 20th century. Getting tickets to see a production will take coordination and at least €65 for a decent seat (overall, prices are cheaper than in London), but you can take a short tour of the building for €9. Unfortunately tickets are not bookable online, and the ticket office is not very helpful with information in advance even when you contact them directly. Tours are liable to be cancelled if there are rehearsals, and the schedule for that seems … extremely flexible. So the best way to secure tickets is to turn up at the box office the morning you want to go, and try to get tickets for one of the two English language tours. Fortunately, the historic centre is a compact area so you’ll have plenty to do while waiting for your appointment.

The tour starts at the main public entrance just across from the enormous Galleria shopping mall. The foyer and grand staircase are almost plain, grey-white marble spaces, curiously short of ornament in this city of excess. The hallways surrounding the entrances to the boxes are almost sepulchral in their cold austerity. Other cities took the basic architectural model and added to it; this is practically streamlined Danish design in comparison to Paris’ Opera Garnier.

The Neapolitans have saved their decorative attention for the performance space. Here is the classic horseshoe-shaped auditorium, with five tiers of boxes towering over a main floor that’s much less raked than more modern theatres. Apollo, god of music, swirls heavenward in his chariot on the ceiling above, sending light and opera down to us mere mortals. Details on intricately-worked white plaster walls are picked out in gold leaf. All of the upholstery was originally royal blue, to honour the Bourbon rulers who built the place and lived in the attached palace, but a renovation in 1844 brought in the deep red velvet which most of the world’s opera houses have since copied. 

While the stage, its curtain and the large orchestra pit (an innovation suggested here by Verdi) are impressive, it’s hard not to turn your attention to the royal box. It’s clearly the star of any show. Its framing draperies and enormous crown jut upwards through almost two full tiers above it. The king and court had direct access to their level from the palace, eliminating the need to interact with the public. But the king made sure that he could see everyone by prohibiting curtains in the boxes. And everyone could see him because there’s a mirror in every single non-royal box reflecting the people beneath that decorative crown. The audience watched the reflection for their cues to applaud or remain silent. Just follow the king’s lead.

The tour ends in a large event hall that was rebuilt after WWII damage. It’s a functional space with lovely French windows leading out into a garden with views to Castel Nuovo and the sea. You can’t linger here, but when you return to the main stair where you entered you can turn left and go under the stair rather than right to the exit. You’ll then find yourself in a gorgeous cafe that’s directly under the seats in the stalls. It’s an elegant place with a good range of cocktails at prices that aren’t any higher than other venues. (Again, much cheaper than Covent Garden in London.) We happily settled in here for a while. You can actually get in without going on the tour; a side door leads out to the square in front of the palace, just across from the Piazza del Plebiscito.

You can easily do all three of these sites in the same day. Pre-book your Sansevero Chapel entry for 1 or 2, any day but Sunday. Start your day at the Teatro San Carlo box office when it opens at 9. See if you can get tickets for one of the English tours, usually at 11:30 or 15:30. If you snag the morning tour, have a stroll around the Piazza del Plebiscito and linger over a coffee at a pastry at Gambrinus, Naples' most beautiful cafe. You can then go to the cloisters, which are in between the opera and the chapel, in the afternoon. Or swap that around if you're on the afternoon opera tour. There are countless places to eat and drink along the route to offer sustenance in your day of opulent sightseeing.

On the trail of Caravaggio in Naples (and London)

Other cities can boast of owning more paintings by Caravaggio: Rome has seven and Milan six against Naples’ trio. Yet the dramatic master of dark and light seems to haunt the streets of Naples to a much greater degree than he stands out in those other places.

Maybe it’s the drama of his time here, his first visit on the run from a murder charge and his second to die after a horrifically violent revenge attack. He was a broken genius who didn’t even make it to 40. Perhaps it’s the fact that, unlike the multitude of famous artists associated with Rome and Milan, he stands well above everyone else who worked in Naples. It could be that his focus on humble realism and the interplay of the grim and the glorious perfectly matches the feel of this city. Or maybe it’s that he left three of his best here: the most enigmatic, the most powerful and the most poignant. Whatever the reason, many tourists to Naples hit the Caravaggio trail to drink in those three works, and we were ready for the pilgrimage.

It wasn’t, however, as easy as you’d think. Under normal circumstances, the paintings live in three different buildings scattered across Naples; do-able in a day though you may not be able to fully appreciate all the rest of the art they share space with. We discovered, however, that one of the three was out of the city on loan. 

Fortunately, St. Ursula was enjoying superstar status at the National Gallery in London, so we could visit it when we got home. The Seven Works of Mercy was hanging in the church of Pio Monte della Misericordia, where it had been since being painted for the charitable foundation in 1607. But where was The Flagellation of Christ? It had been on loan to the Donna Regina museum, but posters throughout the city clearly stated the special exhibition ended on 28 February. The web site of the Capodimonte Museum clearly stated that the loan ended at the end of March. It was mid-April. So we piled in a taxi and headed out of the town centre to the museum housed in the old royal palace, only to discover that not only was the Caravaggio still on loan … but it was about 100 metres away from where we’d gotten our taxi in the first place. We also learned Capodimonte’s most palatial rooms are not open on Sundays. Another somewhat important detail not mentioned on the museum’s web site.

Sightseeing in Italy always requires a hefty dose of flexibility.

Even without its star sights, the Capodimonte museum was a useful starting point for an exploration of Caravaggio. Most of the second floor, which is comprised of traditional galleries rather than palace interiors, hosts an exhibition on Naples in the time of Caravaggio. This explores the financial and artistic boom taking place in the city in the 17th century. It lays out the politics and explains how the Bourbon monarchs invested in the arts to display their power and bring tourists to their city. They went beyond painting and architecture to support a china factory at Capodimonte, wood carving, and the nativity scene figures that are so popular today. Then you get to wander through room after room of artists who were influenced by, and in many cases competed with, Caravaggio. There are some striking works here but, on the whole, the exhibition sets you up to better appreciate just how extraordinary an artist he was compared to everyone else. Only a large canvas by Artemisia Gentileschi stands out as comparable; it’s the blockbuster you don’t want to leave without seeing.

Moving on to the actual Caravaggios, it makes sense to see them in the order they were painted. That means starting with the enigmatic one: The Seven Works of Mercy. The story usually told is that Caravaggio was commissioned to do seven paintings to hang above each of the seven chapel altars in the round church of Pio Monte della Misericordia, and that the often-rebellious artist chose to pack all seven into one blockbuster scene. Caravaggio biographer Andrew Graham-Dixon reveals the truth: his brief from the beginning was to pack the scene. It wasn’t even for the current church. The finished work was so impressive, and so instantly famous, that the charitable foundation that commissioned it built a new church … the one you see today … to better glorify it.

The Seven Works does indeed hang in a beautiful building, with lavish inlaid marble details, paintings above the other altars and sculptural works in niches, but it’s hard to pay attention to anything besides Caravaggio’s blockbuster. Like a magnet exerting its forceful pull, the painting captures all eyes from the minute people cross the threshold, and there’s a perpetual gaggle of humanity gathered beneath it, staring up in slack-jawed awe.

Part of its attraction is the intellectual puzzle it presents in trying to identify the seven acts. Even if you know what you’re looking for, it takes a while to figure out what is essentially a Neapolitan street scene circa 1607. The lady offering her breast to the old man behind the prison gate is rather obviously visiting the imprisoned and feeding the hungry. People who know Catholic saints will probably pick up St. Martin cutting his cloak in half to clothe the naked at the bottom right. But most will need to turn to a guide for the rest. Burying the dead, for example, is represented by the dirty feet of a corpse being carried away into the darkness.

Fortunately there’s a 3D model you can get your hands on that explains each. It’s intended for the vision impaired but is useful for everyone. This is the kind of painting you can stare at for ages, moving from one perspective to another, trying to figure out what’s going on and what all those hyper-realistic people are thinking. My favourite part is the vortex of whirling angels coming in from the top to throw light on the scene and bring down Mary and the infant Jesus as witnesses. It’s mad, and wonderful.

While the Caravaggio dominates, you really should tear yourself away long enough to appreciate a series of sculptures in carved coral that deliver a modern take on the Mercies. Artist Jan Fabre uses small pieces of coral carved into the familiar shapes of Neapolitan jewellery … horns, flowers, beads, spheres … to assemble much larger works that speak to the topics. They’re in niches around the side altars and they are magnificent.

On to the powerful one. 

The Flagellation of Christ is one of the most emotionally arresting pieces of art ever created. Caravaggio takes us close in to the life-sized action as an exhausted Christ is lashed to a column in anticipation of his torture. He’s surrounded by soldiers who treat this as part of their job, perfunctory and emotionless. The man in the bottom corner is tying together the branches he’ll soon use to scourge Christ’s flesh. You don’t need to be a Christian to appreciate this painting. It’s an eloquent and horrifying essay on man’s inhumanity to man. If you believe, it is … as Caravaggio intended … like being present and a witness to one of the most important moments in human existence. 

I can’t remember a painting ever making me cry before. But weep I did. I’d seen this one in reproduction many times but the impact of the real thing packs an enormous punch. 

That’s magnified by the exceptional temporary display. The Diocesan Museum of Naples sprawls over a complex of two churches, both called Donnaregina (old and new) and their accompanying monastery buildings. The new church is a classic explosion of Baroque excess, with multicoloured marbles, whirling saints, dramatic paintings and lashings of gold everywhere. Unusually, there’s a choir loft not just above the entry, but above the altar, and that’s where The Flagellation currently hangs. It is alone in the large, dark space, illuminated by a spotlight just as Caravaggio lit his subjects. The curators have placed a line of remarkably comfortable black leather sofas along the edge of the loft, back to the church below and face to the painting. You’re invited to linger. Sink in. Contemplate.  

A museum employee told me that the painting would go on loan to one or two other places in Italy before being returned to the Capodimonte Museum once its current renovation is complete. There is, naturally, no information I can find on the internet to confirm this. Seeing this painting in the next couple of years will require detective work. 

I probably wouldn’t put the Donnaregina complex on my top 10 list for Naples without the Caravaggio, but if you’re here do take the time to go over to the old church, which has a choir loft that runs two thirds of the way across the length of the building and features a spectacular series of late medieval frescoes under an exuberant carved wooden ceiling. 

With Caravaggio on the brain I couldn’t help but get to the National Gallery soon after my return from Naples to complete the trifecta. The loan of St. Ursula celebrates the museum’s 200th anniversary this year, and the crowds waiting to see the painting underline Caravaggio’s appeal to modern audiences around the world. (Although I was interested to note that on my visit at least a third of the people around me were speaking Italian.) 

Like the rest of the main museum, seeing this painting is free, but it’s displayed in its own gallery just to the right (east side) of the main entrance staircase and you’ll have to queue for it, starting downstairs in the Annenberg Court. While the National Gallery’s web site encourages you to book a place to see it, the only real advantage this gives you is entry through the special exhibitions door, rather than waiting in the main building entry queue. Beyond that, nobody even checks to see your reservation when you join the Caravaggio-specific queue. On the day I visited, wait times were consistently about 20 minutes. This temporary exhibition runs until 21 July and, unlike the wandering of the Flagellation, I think you can consider that a firm date. 

The Martyrdom of St. Ursula was Caravaggio’s last painting. He died two months later in horrible pain after attackers carved strips of skin off his face. Ursula lacks the sharp definition of the Works or the Flagellation. Caravaggio was desperate and on the run, a broken man who was working at speed. The detail may not be there but the emotion remains. We get St. Ursula’s moment of shocked comprehension as an arrow plunges into her heart. The soldier who fired it stands at point blank range; like the men in the Flagellation, he’s just another bloke doing his job. Onlookers behind her are horrified, but can’t do anything to stop the nightmare. Most powerful of all is the observer directly at her shoulder, howling in pain. It’s Caravaggio’s last self portrait. A genius of an artist, a problematic mess of a man, raging at the injustice of a life drawing to its premature close. 

It’s poignant stuff.  

If you can’t get to Naples, at least get to Trafalgar Square. And when in Naples, don’t leave without hitting the Caravaggio Trail. These paintings capture the soul of the city.

Mamma Mia! Neapolitan pizza lives up to its lofty reputation

Every Neapolitan on the planet will confidently tell you that they invented pizza, and theirs remains the best in the world. Testing these claims is one of the greatest joys of any visit to Naples.

A recently unearthed fresco from Pompeii seems to validate the first assertion. It also makes a 2,000-year old proclamation on whether you should be drinking red wine or beer with your slice. (Wine, obviously.) A venerable procession of travel writers and TV presenters have upheld the taste claims; both Stanley Tucci and the BBC’s Clive Myrie have both celebrated the primacy of this humble Neapolitan dish on recent shows. Why pizza in Naples is so much better than its incarnations in the rest of the world is, however, less discussed.

I’m going to offer four reasons why I think Neapolitan pizza is unique, before telling you about two fabulous pizzerias we tried on our visit.

FIRST is the quality of ingredients. Tomatoes from Southern Italy are the best in the world and there’s a strong argument that the San Marzanos grown on the slopes of Vesuvius are the best of those. They provoke eye-rolling delight in tomato-lovers, pull grudging admiration from those who aren’t normally keen, and make most of what we get in England taste like flavourless mush. Cheese is proper buffalo’s milk mozzarella, unctuous and soft, none of this industrially processed stuff. Basil is fresh and sharp. If you go beyond this sacred combo that comprises the margherita, you’ll get equal attention to detail. Everyone is passionate about using what’s seasonal. This is the quintessential example of the Italian belief that great ingredients, treated well, make great food.

SECOND is an elegant simplicity. This seems counter-cultural. As someone with Sicilian blood flowing in her veins, I know that most Southern Italians embrace the maxim “more is more” in most aspects of their lives. But this does NOT apply to Neapolitan pizza. There are none of the “everything but the kitchen sink” combos so beloved in America. Nobody tries to pile a whole block of cheese onto one crust. A Neapolitan pizza probably has between half and a third of the toppings you’d find in most pizzas elsewhere in the world. There is just enough, and no more, to allow you to savour and fully appreciate each element. Everything is in perfect balance. Nothing overwhelms. Which brings us to… 

… the dough. THIRD is that the dough is as important as the toppings. In so many other variations on pizza, the dough is simply a conveyance for getting the other ingredients into your mouth. It’s a wheat-based substitute for cutlery, that people often leave as uneaten crusts after polishing off the topping. Such behaviour would be anathema to Neapolitans. Done properly, it’s sourdough, made daily, and left to rise for 24 hours before use. which means it’s light and pillowy, on par with the best bread anywhere. Neapolitan pizza toppings do not go all the way up to the crust edge, as most others do, but leave a wide margin of dough. This ring or crust is known as the “cornicione”, should puff and bubble in the oven, and is far too delicious to leave behind on your plate.

FOURTH, cooking temperatures are extreme. Wood-fired pizza ovens can be found all over the world these days but few, claim the Neapolitans, get as hot as theirs. The extreme temperatures mean their pizzas cook in about two minutes. That means … coming back to the ingredients … nothing has a chance to lose its flavour in the cooking process. And, critically, the dough at the centre of the pizza is as crisp and chewy as that cornicione.

Neapolitan natives will tell you that who’s making the best pizza changes all the time, that it’s rarely the famous places, and that you should never have to pay more than €10 for a great one. These sorts of places tend not to have seating or take reservations: look for a queue, get in it, order a slice and eat it on the street. We compromised, opting for more upscale places with bookable tables in their dining rooms, but recommended by locals.

Da Concettina ai Tre Santi is on one of the main streets in Rione Sanità, a once-deprived neighbourhood in the middle of a regeneration boom. The Oliva family has been serving up pizzas here for around 70 years, but the neighbourhood’s transformation, recent investment from an Italian venture capital firm and a mention in the Michelin guide have combined to make this a destination restaurant. The interior is lively and has a fresh, quirky blend of art on the walls. The servers are cheerful and most speak English. The wine list is excellent, particularly on the local wines of Campania.

But you’ll forget all of that once you taste the pizza, which will be in front of you minutes after ordering. There’s a whole page of classic margherita options, giving you the chance to mix up your combos of tomato and cheese types. But Concettina pushes beyond the classics with a broad menu of inventive choices. I was keen to try friarielli, a local specialty that’s somewhere between cavolo nero and purple sprouting broccoli and was at the height of its season. It came on a pizza with sausage and cheese. Absolutely exquisite and incredibly rich, it was an effort to finish all four slices on the individually-sized plate but I pushed on. To leave even a bite of something that delicious behind would have been criminal. I swapped bites with friends so sampled the Margherita; some of the best tomatoes I’ve ever tasted. I would have been delighted with that option, too.

Concettina’s dining room is small and books up well in advance. But the good news is that there’s a bustling pick up window from which you can order online, or wander up and order spur-of-the-moment. Once you’re in nearby streets you can probably put away your mapping app and just swim upstream against the flow of pizza boxes being carried away. Those super-hot ovens are clearly good not just for tasty crusts, but for producing a massive turnover of profitable product.

Locals also frequently recommended Salvo, another family-run operation. This one’s across town from Sanità in the upscale Chiaia district, on the main boulevard across from the waterside park. It’s so similar to Concettina in atmosphere and quality of pizza that I honestly can’t pick a favourite.

Here, I was led once again by seasonal vegetables and went for an artichoke and ham offering. It seemed counter-intuitive that both of my Neapolitan pizza choices were without tomato, but the red stuff is not as ubiquitous in the land of pizza’s birth as you’d think. Like the friarielli, fresh artichokes have a very distinctive flavour and were in season. They also have quite a subtle taste that is easily overwhelmed by the sweet acidity of tomato. Instead, it goes perfectly with the mellower sweetness of pork and the silk of cheese. It was one of the best pizza combinations I’ve had.

We were at Salvo’s for Saturday lunch and it was delightful to see the locals enjoying themselves. This is obviously a spot for big group gatherings and we were surrounded by massive tables of families and friends all radiating the joy of life and being together. The big groups did mean the service was a bit slower here, but we didn’t mind.

You could easily eat nothing but pizza in Naples, and I would have loved to try some of the more humble, queue-up-and-eat-in-the-street offerings. But we had a busy schedule. Reservations made our days easier to plan and tables offered a welcome rest from intensive sightseeing. I’d happily return to either of these places. Ultimately, the choice is down to convenience of location. Either will give you a memorable pizza that embodies the four points I’ve laid out above and proves why, though the whole world makes pizza, its origin point in Naples has an edge.

Herculaneum and Naples' archaeological museum deliver a double dose of luxury

What did the Romans ever do for us?

While I don’t remember luxury lifestyles and exquisite interior design being on Monty Python’s list, that’s the inescapable conclusion when you spend the morning wandering around Herculaneum and the afternoon in the archaeological museum where the Neapolitans keep all the wonders they excavated from the sites around Vesuvius. 

We splashed out on our own bit of luxury and hired a private guide for the day, which elevated what would already have been a good experience into a great one. Raffaele is a highly-trained working archaeologist who’s also an accredited and award-winning tour guide. Time living in London perfected his English. It was obvious within the first few minutes that we’d chosen well. Not only did he know his stuff, and have a great sense of humour, but he knew exactly how to time our route to avoid crowds, where to stand for the best views, and which highlights to bring out that visitors on their own might walk right by. (For example: a beautiful fresco of some wine bottles that turned out to be a menu with prices outside a wine bar; something highly relevant to our annual Girls’ Trips.)

I’ve been to Pompeii twice and, in a head-to-head battle, now that I’ve seen Herculaneum I prefer it. The differences are obvious from the beginning, when you arrive at the site without running the gauntlet of souvenir hawkers and tourist tat shops. Herculaneum … or, to give it the Italian name you need to look for on signs, Erculano Scavi … sits in a quiet and comfortable modern suburb of Naples with some apartments looking right down into the ruins. Without the road signs, you’d never guess your way from the train station to the tourist attraction. 

Once through the entry turnstiles you’ll see the most powerful view of the day as you stand above the excavations and take everything in at one glance. Pre-eruption, to be in this spot you would have had to hover, drone-like, about 25 metres above the beach immediately below. Today you’re looking down at the same waterfront buildings, but you’re standing on a cliff edge of the mud and pumice that excavators had to carve away to get to the city. The shoreline that would have been directly below you is now about a mile behind you. Through the doors of what’s obviously a waterside warehouse below you, you can see piles of human skeletons. They are the remains of citizens who flocked to the harbour and took refuge in port buildings hoping for rescue from the sea. It never came. Vesuvius looms on the horizon in front of you, looking innocent … but everyone knows it was entirely responsible for the disaster. Seeing it all at once fills you with awe, wonder and fear.

From a simple logistical point of view Herculaneum is smaller than Pompeii. It’s therefore easer to get around and to take it all in without becoming overwhelmed. It’s not quite as well known, therefore less crowded. The effects of the volcano were slightly different in the two places , so while Herculaneum was still buried and its inhabitants killed, the way it happened means preservation here is better. There are buildings with intact roofs, doors and beams, items of furniture … even a boat … all preserved because the heat was so extreme it instantly fossilised wood into stone-hard charcoal. Instead of the plaster casts of bodies everyone knows from Pompeii, here there are the skeletons. And if you are as obsessed with Roman art and architecture as I am, you’ll notice that stylistically the mosaics, frescoes and architectural details are at a consistently higher level here. There is no single thing quite as blockbuster as the famous frescoes at Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries, but in house after house you’ll see exquisite decoration done in subtle detail and striking colours. Pompeii decorators were following trend setters; Herculaneum’s residents were setting the trends.

My favourite was the house of Neptune and Amphitrite, where the sea god and his wife adorn one wall in a mosaic so detailed you may initially think it’s a painting. They’re surrounded by festoons of blue and green decoration, bright as the day it was installed, given texture by a border of sea shells. The colour scheme continues on the adjacent wall where animals bound through a hunt on that bright … and probably very expensive … blue background. Other parts of the room’s walls are done in a vividly contrasting fresco of a garden caught in the fiery orange blaze of sunset. This was a summer dining room, open to the air above, with niches for lamps and a fountain in the middle between the dining couches. It doesn’t take much imagination to recreate the beauty of life here, sipping an exquisite glass of Vesuvian wine to the music of the fountain as lamplight flickered off the glass of the mosaics. 

While Pompeii was a bustling port city, Herculaneum was an upscale beach resort surrounded by aristocrats’ sprawling holiday villas. If you think about the difference between modern Naples and Capri, you’re probably in the right ballpark. Thus Herculaneum had more than the average number of jewellery stores, public amenities and upscale food and wine outlets. The shop beside the house of Neptune and Amphitrite comes complete with wooden wine racks and partitions; possibly the best-preserved retail interior of the ancient world. Outside the best houses you’ll find benches built for “clients” to wait to see their patron. The more people waiting outside your house, the more important you were.

These days, we park ourselves outside the CEO’s office. Same routine, different architecture.

Raffaele explained that the conspicuous consumption here would have been fuelled by rich, freed slaves from Imperial and Aristocratic households who had both influence and cash, but not citizenship. Proclaiming their influencer status in this exclusive place not only built their profile, but smoothed the way for their children who could become full Roman citizens.

Citizens and wealthy freed slaves alike shopped on a gracious high street dignified by a triumphal arch. Most of its decorations are gone and there’s only a bit of the quadriga (four-horse chariot) that stood atop it left in the museum in Naples, but the brick core is enough to impress. Most of the buildings along this street still have their upper stories; some still have wooden screens and awnings. Shoppers might have gathered later to do business in the College of the Augustales, a civic building near the arch with some of the most memorable frescoes in town. 

A short walk away is an impressive school complex where the next generation could prepare to take their role amongst the elite. Most interesting here isn’t the posh architecture, however, but the fact that you can wander into some of the excavation tunnels and get an even better sense of how all of this stuff was chiselled out of the ossified mud. 

If the bustle of town was too much for you, you could sit to enjoy the quiet of small vineyards or orchards; now re-planted based on analysis of the calcified remains from 79 AD. Or you might head off to a small but exquisite gymnasium and bath complex. The separate women’s section still has some original glass in its round window and barrel-vaulted roofs ridged so that the condensation would slide down towards the walls rather than irritate anyone by dripping. Classy.

Don’t leave without checking out the two small museum buildings. One holds the boat that was found on the shore; a hoped-for escape never realised. The other has a collection of treasures brought out of the ground and too fragile or valuable to be left outside. There are more frescoes, statues, lamps, some beautiful pieces of furniture and a lot of gold jewellery that you’d happily put on today.

To see the real treasures of the excavations, however, you need to go back to Naples. After a restorative lunch break, we met back up with Raffaele for Part Two of our tour at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.

This is one of the great museums of the world and, happily, it’s undergone a transformation for the better since my last visit. Back in 2003 the whole building was in deplorable shape, complete with broken windows and vines growing through the gaps. Those windows are whole and clean. The entire place has had a major scrub down and re-paint, and the collection feels like it’s undergone a curatorial revolution in the way objects are grouped and explained. 

Though there are galleries of Egyptian and pre-historic stuff here, this is overwhelmingly a museum dedicated to the glories of Ancient Greece and Rome, brought together by two events. First, the discovery of Pompeii and neighbouring sites saw an unprecedented flow of treasures out of the ground. The presiding king at the time, Charles VII, kicked the military out of its HQ to start storing the finds there, and eventually converted that building into the museum it is today. Second came the same king’s inheritance of the Farnese collection of Greek and Roman statuary through his mother, which he added to his Vesuvian loot.

These days there are at least 30 galleries worth strolling through, so having a guide who knows the collection is tremendously useful. Raffaele took us through the key treasures that were unearthed in the Vesuvius sites, letting us revel in exquisite mosaics, fine jewellery, housewares, glass, and more. 

Some of the greatest treasures are from the Villa dei Papiri, a massive spread that was just on the outskirts of Herculaneum and is not open to the public. Anyone who has visited the Getty Villa in Malibu will be familiar with the Herculanean place, as Getty copied it exactly to build his Californian museum and then stuffed it full of Greco-Roman art. The Papiri artefacts get two large rooms here in Naples, stuffed with wonders. The bronze statues, particularly two young, male runners and a set of decorously clothed women who fuelled a fountain with water from vases in their arms, are so lifelike the story of Pygmalion seems perfectly credible.

Also upstairs, Raffaele showed us the enormous hall that the king built as a library and event space at the centre of his collection. Pride of place here is given to the Farnese Cup, more of a shallow bowl really, carved in agate with one scene on the inside, and another … a magnificent medusa’s head … on the opposite, or bottom. It is beautifully displayed with lights shining on it so you can appreciate the colours of the agate and how the scenes change depending upon the direction you are looking from. There’s also a small exhibition on the famous Alexander the Great mosaic, which is being restored right now so not visible.In another one of those great little tour guide additions, Raffaele also pointed out a sundial built into the floor with inlaid marble and bronze. There is a tiny hole in the roof, and at noon each day the sun comes through to tell you the date and what sign of the zodiac you are in based on where it lands on the floor. Without someone to call it to their attention, most people would walk right by.

My favourite artefacts on this floor are fragments of mosaic columns and niches, all in a glorious blue background, that I would have reproduced for my own garden room if I won a very large lottery.

Raffaele also took us through galleries on the ground floor containing significant treasures from other sites in the Southern Italy. This includes what is probably the best collection of ancient Greek bronzes outside of Greece, thanks to the Romans’ passion for the stuff.

We lingered after the end of our official tour to do the Farnese Collection on our own, marvelling particularly … as all the Grand Tourists before us have … at the larger-than-life sculptural group of young athletes trying to restrain a raging bull. My favourite piece in these galleries, though, is a little-known work. It’s a sculpture about waist high that shows one man wrestling a whole pig onto a barbecue shaped like a kettle, while another adds charcoal below. Might this have been the inspiration for the Weber company? More importantly, is it the first depiction of barbecuing in art? Now there would be an idea for a thesis if I went back to school for an advanced degree.

My brain would have enjoyed another three hours in the museum, but my body had given up. At this point, Raffaele came through one last time with a fabulous tip, sending us across the street to the Galleria Principe di Napoli. The building was partially boarded up, looked derelict and showed no hint of internal promise. And yet, at its centre was an exquisite cocktail bar called Tesoraria. It’s decorated in elegant Liberty style … the Italian version of Art Nouveau … complete with sinuous floral ironwork, statues, draperies, balconies and a magnificent bar. It was as if we had travelled in time to 1900 and Verdi and friends would enter dramatically in white tie and top hats at any moment. The cocktails tasted as good as the place looked, delivered by waiters in crisp uniforms and long aprons. We meant to return, and the restaurant in the basement looked intriguing, but our own garden was so beautiful we collapsed there on other nights for our happy hour.

In fact, everything I saw on our day with the Romans made me want to return to explore more. We covered an enormous amount of ground with Raffaele‘s help, but there is so much more beauty to drink in from that extraordinary time period. I am keeping Raffaele‘s name in my address book. Next time I plan a trip to Naples, he is going to be my first call.

See Naples to live: A chaotic city delivers abundant rewards for those willing to embrace it

Naples is an assault on the senses.

It is the loudest city I’ve ever visited. Car and scooter horns vie with sirens and church bells. Planes rumble overhead toward an airport close to the city centre. The average Neapolitan speaks at a genial shout and works up. Your eyes will need sunglasses not just to shade them from the southern sun hitting a dazzling palette of building colours, but to knock back the fierce visual cacophony of graffiti that covers most surfaces. Exceptional Baroque architecture and Liberty-style statement buildings do battle with centuries of grime and crumbling plaster. Your nose will recoil from car exhausts, the ripe waft of an occasional sewer and old-world levels of smoking. That will soon be countered by the Neapolitan proclivity for strong perfumes and aftershaves and glorious gusts of oregano, tomato, baking dough and charcoal.

Life is lived on the streets but there are few green spaces or spots of solitude. Getting anywhere requires weaving and diving around crowds packed into narrow lanes. Keep one eye always on the ground: streets and pavements are as patchy as a teenager’s skin, with cobbles erupting and holes gaping. Keep the other eye on constant watch for scooters that speed out of nowhere and treat rules of the road with a cheerful disdain. “Vespa” is the Italian word for “wasp”; a triumph of product naming.

Naples is one of the oldest continuously occupied cities in Europe. It was a significant port and cultural hotspot within the Ancient Greek world in the 5th century BC, when the Romans were just a backwater tribe dreaming of expansion. That’s why so much of the city feels like a hotch potch. There is nothing truly new; everything in layered upon the past. The look of the 17th and 18th centuries dominates the main tourist districts. This is when Naples was at its richest and most powerful, with an enormous cultural significance. This, not Rome or Florence, was the must-see climax of the Grand Tour.

It’s quite an irony, then, that today’s Naples seems far less damaged by tourism than Italian cities further north. Venice and much of Tuscany now feel like cultural theme parks staffed by Italians for the benefit of … and to extract cash from … foreigners. Naples is crowded. Traffic is a constant and you’ll be jostled by humanity almost everywhere, but the majority were locals going about their daily lives. We were welcomed, but we were an addition to the life of the city and not the reason for it.

The most obvious example was Sunday evening in a triangle formed by the Castel Nuovo, the Castel d’Ovo and the Piazza della Repubblica, all jammed with people as if it were some massive festival, or crowds were exiting a football match. Nope, just the usual weekend passeggiata in a picturesque part of the city, where the population spills onto the street to promenade, gossip, dance, drink and eat.

There are, of course, tourists here. In high season more than 10,000 a day spill off the cruise ships docking at Beverello, according to one of our taxi drivers. But the majority of tourists … as I did on my first visit in childhood … are only passing through the city en route to Pompeii or Capri. Most of the tourist groups we rubbed shoulders with were Italian teenagers on school trips. Only Spaccanapoli, the long, straight lane that cuts through the heart of the historic district, was truly hard going. But even in the most touristy areas I heard as much Italian as anything else. 

This perspective may, admittedly, come from the time of year of our visit and, more importantly, where we stayed.

Locals continually told us that April and May are ideal times of year. It’s warm but not too hot, generally sunny, with flowers and trees bursting into life. Schools around the world are still in session so the main flow of foreign tourists hasn’t started.

We rented an apartment in the Rione Sanità, a neighbourhood I was distinctly warned not to go near on mylast visit twenty years ago. Times have changed. As with gentrification trends everywhere, the neighbourhood’s cheap rents attracted artists and other creative types. More trend setters followed. Now the local pizzeria is listed in the Michelin Guide and is angling for a star. (Review to come.) This is the best place to stay if you want to have a more authentic Neapolitan experience, for a better price than the traditional tourist hotels.

It still looks rough. Renovation may be taking place inside but from the exterior most of the buildings are streaked with dirt and missing chunks of plaster. One local explained that the city’s UNESCO world heritage site listing is more curse than blessing. It brings the visitors and preserves the history, but strict rules on renovation mean nobody can afford to fix anything.

I think many visitors … particularly Americans … equate that general look of decay with danger. We never felt unsafe, even when taking a wrong turn and twisting though small lanes after dark. There are far more beggars and homeless people lurking in doorways in London than we encountered here. The only real threat are motorbikes racing down small lanes at high speed; it’s essential to move towards the wall whenever you hear a beep behind you. In fact, the neighbourhood was so friendly that by our fifth morning, as we walked down our now familiar little lane with our luggage, the locals in all the small shops along the way smiled and waved goodbye.

Our apartment, Cerasiello, was idyllic. Like almost everything in Naples, its rough exterior belies what you’ll find inside. You enter through a tiny door in battered, ancient gates set in a massive, near featureless building that takes up a whole city block. You find yourself in a courtyard, sky visible four very tall stories above. 

It’s all a bit dingy and the first thing you’ll notice is the rather ugly lift dropped into the middle of the far side of the courtyard, looking like those temporary ones they erect on construction sites. As your eyes adjust to the half light, however, you’ll notice that all four stories of the wall behind the lift are dominated by a grand staircase, crumbling but still magnificent. 

Before the neighbourhood went into decline, it was full of grand palaces, and this was one of them. Once the heavy courtyard door shuts, the noise of the street disappears and the songbirds kept by residents overlooking the courtyard contribute a gentler soundtrack. Potted plants and hanging laundry jostle for space on windows, walls and landings.

Cerasiello is on the top floor. I was very glad of that lift, even though you need to feed it €.20 a ride. The property has four bedrooms, each with en-suite bathroom, surrounding a long sitting room, a small kitchen and a truly magnificent roof garden with a view of Vesuvius. We spent most of our time at home out here, surrounded by enormous potted plants that made it feel like a real oasis from the city. 

The tasteful decor is a mash-up of traditional Italian with a bit of Sicilian and North African, giving the whole place a slightly exotic feel. The owners have taken great care with the lighting, including up lighters on the roof garden and small, stained glass table lamps inside to create atmospheric puddles of light throughout.

You can book individual rooms rather than renting the whole property; in which case the living room, kitchen and roof garden become shared space with other guests. If you only rented one room, ask for the one with french doors that open directly to the roof garden. The window in the bedroom looks towards Vesuvius, while the one in the bathroom looks over the roofs and church domes of Rione Sanità and up at Castel Sant’Elmo. 

Cerasiello is on the very edge of Rione Sanità, only about 200 metres from the Via Foria that divides the neighbourhood from the historic centre. You’re only 10-15 minutes away from key sites like the archaeological museum, the Duomo, the cloisters at Santa Chiara and the street of the nativity scene makers. You’re also close to two different metro stations, though I confess that with four of us to split the cost we took taxis when we needed to go further than our feet would carry us.

Our roof garden and the feeling of being part of a local neighbourhood provided a welcome counterpoint to the noise and bustle of the city. Naples is a perpetual motion machine. It is exhausting and brutal, yet glorious and full of joy. It isn’t an easy city in which to be a tourist, but effort pays vast rewards in the treasures you see, the craftsmanship you can buy and the people you meet. The guys who made us coffee every morning felt like friends by the end of our long weekend.

Neapolitans themselves will tell you that the unique character of this place is due to its position directly beneath one of the world’s most menacing volcanoes. Vesuvius’ last big explosion … the one that buried Pompeii, blew the mountain’s top off and exerted a force equivalent to two atomic bombs … was nearly 2,000 years ago. Most vulcanologists say it's overdue for another major eruption. People live here with a constant awareness of death, reinforced by a muscular Catholicism that reminds people of death and resurrection in every church.

Even the most famous tourist line about the city brings up endings. “See Naples and then die” was the phrase constantly repeated by Grand Tourists, most memorably in Goethe’s letters home. The meaning was that you’d reached the best of everything here, and you didn’t need to see anything else for artistic and cultural fulfilment.

These days I’d change that phrase to “See Naples to live.” I can’t think of anywhere else that’s so chaotically, marvellously, exhaustingly alive.

The annual Northwestern Girls' Trip marks 25 years of marvellous adventures & priceless friendship

In October of 1999, three American expats living in England answered Northwestern University’s call to represent the institution at London’s Fulbright College Fair. They hadn’t known each other on campus, but the girls had all graduated within four years of each other and quickly hit it off. All eager to take advantage of the opportunities for tourism offered by life in England, they thought they might be good travel companions. In March of 2000 they put their suspicion to the test.

The rest is history.

Tomorrow, it’s officially 25 years of gloriously entertaining, adventurous, relaxing, story-spinning history. Our annual Northwestern Girls’ Trip hits the milestone when we board our British Airways flight to Naples.

There have been changes over the years. In the early days we were more likely to do multiple, short trips across the year. As we settled in to life in the UK and our jobs got progressively bigger, we focused on just one significant, annual journey. We’ve never missed a year, though parental illnesses, work travel, breast cancer and Covid all proved challenging. In 2020 we slipped a glorious road trip to Devon and Cornwall in between lockdowns but in 2021, despite two attempts, we only managed one day as a complete group due to positive Covid tests amongst us. Over time, our working lives became so busy we learned to compare diaries and pencil in the date for the next year as we were wrapping up the current trip. Once the dates are resolved, girls' trip is sacred.

In 2017, we expanded our trio to a quartet. It was a big decision, given the perfect balance we’d established, but we’d all known Suzy almost as long as we’d known each other. And though she hadn’t graduated from Northwestern, she’d worked for me twice … the first time straight out of uni … and I’d taught her much of what Medill taught me … so we granted her our special girls’ trip honorary degree. 

Finding ideal travel companions is no easy task. People like to move at different paces, do different things, and have different price points. Learning to go on holiday together was, by far, the biggest challenge of my marriage and one that took years to sort comfortably. From that first trip with the girls, however, it was clear that we were naturally in tune with each other’s preferences. 

The ideal girls’ trip should have a near-perfect balance of history, culture, fabulous food, vineyards, shopping, and indolent self-indulgence. We are all naturally curious and love to learn. We sightsee in high-energy bursts, then collapse happily into spas, wine bars or quiet spaces with a good book. We love an off-the-beaten-path experience. We’re also a gregarious bunch, and we’ve talked our way into a notable number of upgrades and remarkable extra treats. Perhaps the most extraordinary example took place in a forgettable town in central Spain. We were the only foreigners in the restaurant during a local festival. Our enthusiasm so charmed the waiters that they gave us a tour of their extraordinary wine cellars, dating back to Roman times, while we were waiting for a table. They lovingly described every course of the festival menu as we ate, then cracked out their home-made post-prandial firewater and invited us to drink with them after the restaurant closed. (Hillary will never let us forget she was the designated driver that day.) The older we get, the more we’ve noticed that young waiters rather enjoy a bit of mild flirtation from a group of women who could be their mothers. Though none have yet equalled those grizzled old Spaniards. 

Though we didn’t set out to define our journeys this way, they’ve become characterised by affordable luxury and often being just ahead of the curve of travel trends. Many places … most notably Speyside, Spain’s Duero wine road, Porto, and Split in Croatia … enjoyed time in the spotlight of the travel press just after we visited. We are the best travel documentary the BBC hasn't made. 

The affordable tag, of course, depends on your point of view, and our price point has crept up over the years with incomes and stress levels. But we’ve always focused on finding special places that are excellent value for money rather than just opting for whatever gets written up in a glossy magazine. These days we tend to look for four-bedroom apartments to rent rather than heading for upscale boutique hotels, and we’ve discovered the value of pooling our resources to hire private guides for outings.  

A set of girls’ trip guidelines took shape over the years. We travel over a long weekend, generally Wednesday or Thursday to the following Monday or Tuesday. It’s the least interruption to busy work schedules. Travel time should be no more than four hours. If you are celebrating a decade birthday (40, 50, etc.) then the destination is your choice alone. In other years, it’s a group decision based on a shortlist, with the final call made by vote or … in one memorable year … Lisa’s mother pulling the winning name on a slip out of a bowl after a Michelin-starred dinner. 

Combining resources to hire private guides has led to some of our most memorable experiences. These include a day wandering the slopes of Mount Etna with an oenologist who specialised in Sicilian wine and got us behind the scenes at several remarkable vineyards. 

A proud Basque showed us the little-visited seaside glories and Game of Thrones filming locations of the coast between Bilbao and San Sebastián. 

When a travel agent messed up our reservation in Iceland, a strapping Viking who usually only did high-end tours and had recently hosted Tom Hiddleston stepped in to drive us up to the glacier and take us spelunking in an Icelandic lava tube. 

This Friday, we'll be making new memories as a working archeologist leads us around the ruins of Herculaneum.

Vineyards have been high on the agenda over the years for this wine-loving quartet. Our intense interest in wine, thoughtful questions, focused tasting and … we like to think … tremendously genial personalities have often seen us invited by winemakers into their private cellars to taste stuff they usually don’t open and drinking with them well after official tours have ended. 

We haven’t always followed our own Girls’ Trip guidelines. Two of our journeys stretched over a week and one of those smashed through our 4-hour travel time limit. Lisa’s brief flirtation with moving back to the States meant that she was joining the 2007 trip from New York, so we turned it into a full-scale holiday in Tunisia. This was before terrorist incidents endangered tourism there. Even so, crowds were light outside of the main tourist resorts. Wandering virtually alone through the sprawling Roman ruins at Dougga is one of the great memories in the Girls’ Trip archives. 

Eight years later, when Hillary’s father was coping with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, we travelled to the family home in Florida to revel in the warmth of his larger-than-life personality while he was still with us. 

Sharing parents has indeed become one of the hallmarks of the original trio. As women living thousands of miles from our families we all had a larger-than-average appreciation of time spent with parents. Over the years, a habit grew up of visiting parents including the other girls in a family meal whenever they were in London. All but two of those parents have left us now, but we have the memories forever. (And hope my dad and Hillary’s mum are with us for many years to come.) 

And so … older, wiser, and in need of a lot more down time than when we started … the girls are off to Naples. This year is a significant decade birthday for me, so the location, lodging and itinerary were mine to call. Culture abounds. I get to try to knock the rust off my very rusty Italian. Food here is lauded as amongst the best in a country already famous for its cuisine. And there’s a four-bedroom apartment with a roof garden waiting for us.  

La vita è bella. 

Here’s hoping for another 25 years. And here’s thanking my friends, God and good luck for the extraordinary adventures behind us. Great times with beloved friends are one of life’s most precious treasures on this endlessly diverting journey through life.

British Museum makes Roman army life fun for all ages

As the daughter of an art historian, it never occurred to me that museums weren't standard territory for childhood fun until my own contemporaries started having kids. Only then did it begin to dawn on me that most people didn’t put culture at the top of their family outing options, and that many children considered the idea of spending time in museums both a chore and … gasp! … boring. Why had I never felt this way?

Quite simply: my mother had a unique talent for bringing art and culture to life for children. Trailing along in her wake, I never realised that she was the one turning places like The Art Institute of Chicago, The Getty Villa and the Victoria and Albert Museum into worlds of fantasy and wonder.

Thankfully, her superpower is no longer unique. Many are reinterpreting their collections and adding hands-on experiences to bring the past to life for children of all ages. The British Museum’s new Legion: Life in the Roman Army exhibition is a gloriously entertaining example. The curators have teamed up with Terry Deary, writer of the Horrible Histories series, to create an alternative path through the show for the young, and young at heart. Legion has received rave reviews across the board for its gorgeous design, exceptional artefacts and meaningful insights, but it’s this outreach to young people that impressed me the most.

You’re greeted by a cartoon rat named Claudius Terratus who’s decided to join the army to see the world, gain his citizenship and reap a juicy pension at the end of his service. He pops up throughout your visit to highlight the difficulties and pleasures of the life he’s selected, often accompanied by things to touch and do. You can see if you’re tall enough to make it into the legion, and see how you compare to the tallest-ever Roman. You can lift weights equivalent to the average pack of a soldier to see how you might fare on a march. You can play with knuckle bone dice. You can even put on a helmet and grab a shield.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that many children in a major exhibition, much less having so much fun. Curators around the world need to take note.

Sceptical academics, meanwhile, needn’t fear. The children’s track sits beside a serious deep-dive into this fascinating topic. My friends and family who’ve seen the show include army veterans, military historians and specialists in the Eastern Roman empire. All were impressed.

There are things of great beauty here, from a bronze head of Augustus to ceremonial helmets to one of my British Museum favourites … the Molossian dog that usually sits in a gallery that is too often closed to the public. It’s good to see him taking pride of place. There is, as you would expect, a lot of evidence of war, from the best-preserved Roman shield in the world to swords to horse armour. There’s a lot of evidence of everyday life, from letters home to an almost perfectly-preserved legionaries’ sock.

Poignant touches throughout make this the story not just of an empire or an army, but of people. The tombstones of the soldiers who never made it to that retirement; especially one shown with his grieving father. The armour of a man who died in the famous massacre of Varus’ legions in the Teutoburg Forest. The skeleton of a soldier who died trying to help the citizens of Herculaneum survive Vesuvius’ eruption.

There is something for everyone in this exhibition. Happily, that includes small people who might think museums are boring. Make some time to introduce them to a Roman rat and his horrible adventures, and you might just open a door to a world of fantasy and wonder they can enjoy for the rest of their life.

Legion: Life in the Roman Army is on at the British Museum until 23 June.

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Joanlee’s Playbook
Want to get your kids to museums but don’t have something as cool as the British Museum’s take on the Romans to help you through? Here are three of my mother’s best tactics for getting young people involved.

Go treasure hunting
Pick one thing … dogs, crowns, swords, etc. … and set children out on a treasure hunt to find as many of that object as possible. This is particularly effective if you have two or more kids on your hands, especially if you offer a small amount of cash to be spent by the winner in the museum gift shop at the end of the visit. The hunt makes them actually pay attention to what’s in each room.

Be a time traveller 

Tell your young people they have access to a time machine for a one-way journey. Because of some kindof impending disaster (make it nasty, kids love that), you need to move to some other time in history. The kids are using the museum to do some research. Where are you going to go and why? What is life going to be like? What are you going to bring with you? What type of people will you set yourself up as when you go? Why not book a meal out after your museum visit and let the kids report back on their decisions over the food?

Go shopping
The kids have just won an enormous lottery and everything in the museum is on sale. They can buy three things. What would they buy for their palatial home and why? Where would they put it, or how would they use it? If they had to put the things in order, from what they’d pay most for to least, what would their order be? A variation on this, particularly useful in traditional art museums full of paintings, is to tell them that they can bring one artist back to life to paint their portrait. Who will they resurrect and why? What surroundings will they be painted in and what things will they have painted with them?

These days, almost all museums have education teams specifically dedicated to bringing their collections to life for young people. They’ll produce guides, games and videos that are often free. For many more ideas, seek them out and use them. Many are downloadable before your visit, so you can do some preparation as a family and turn your day out into a special event.