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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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