I had in mind several ways to begin this blog post, but in the end, I opted to be positive—well, as positive as a pessimist can be. Despite having trouble with my photos (accidentally deleted all of them from my camera; was able to get everything back except Herculaneum, but I think I can get those when I get home), my keycard (lost it and waited for nearly an hour in line to get a replacement), and my wi-if package (left the iPad logged in and burned through all of my free minutes), Tuesday was a wonderful day overall, and I’m glad I got to spend it with Mark.
We arrived in Naples overnight, and in the morning, I took some pictures of the city from our balcony. I counted 24 domes across the city, but only some can be seen in these pictures.
We spent a leisurely morning on the ship, which was mostly vacant. Most people had morning or all-day excursions, but our trip to Herculaneum didn’t start until 1 p.m. Our tour guide, Massimo, was very knowledgeable and friendly in a weird, reserved way. He explained Herculaneum something like this (imagine the Italian accent). Pompeii was a commercial center destroyed in 79 AD when Mount Vesuvius erupted. Herculaneum was also destroyed in the eruption, but it was a residential community for the wealthy. My take is that Herculaneum is less famous and, so, less crowded, and it has more beautiful objects, mosaics, and frescos more beautifully preserved than Pompeii. (FYI, I was able to recover my photos. These are some. Just a heads up, the last one is a little disturbing.)
Where I was standing in this shot is on the top of what I thought was just a hill. In actuality, I was on the top of the fifty-foot high mudflow that buried Herculaneum. Those arched portals you see in the foreground are boat slips that used to be right on the Mediterranean. The shore is now about 800 feet behind my back.
This is what’s to be found in those boat slips I pointed out above. Dozens of people tried to flee the mud flow from Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 AD by sailing out into the sea. What they found, instead, was that they were trapped between the turbulent ocean and tons of falling ash and the mud bearing down upon them. The sea proved to be no escape route. I think we’ve become accustomed in our culture to seeing skeletons in Halloween displays and cartoons, but it’s something entirely different to see actual bones that were once actual people. And it’s horrifying to see the remains of real people who died in agony and despair nearly 2,000 years ago.
Our overall impression of Naples as we drove through it was that it was poor and in disrepair. It is possible that we only passed through a rougher part of the city, but it’s clear that the buildings there are very old and could use some love.
After Herculaneum, we returned to the ship, got cleaned up, had a nice stroll on deck and then a nice dinner in the ship’s Italian restaurant. My dietary fussiness gave our waitress and the restaurant manager a bit of a fit. After I ordered and told them that I can’t eat onions, first she and then he came out to tell me that all of their sauces had onions that couldn’t be scraped aside. They were very kind about it, and the manager had the kitchen make up a special spicy aioli for my pasta.
We turned in fairly early knowing we had to get up early this morning in Civitivecchia and get down to the pier to meet our driver. Turns out we didn’t need to get up as early as we’d thought, though. He was 45 minutes late picking us up. After yesterday’s rotten luck, I got more and more nervous that I had done something wrong in booking our excursion and that we were going to be left with nothing to do today. About 20 minutes after our driver was due, the tour company called to tell me that he had been delayed by an accident on the highway and an unusually aggressive port security that, today, was slowing everyone down.
Needless to say, we were a little disgruntled when Mauro finally arrived, but we were determined not to let the delay ruin our day. He apologized profusely and was really quite nice. And while I was somewhat comfortable interacting with Spaniards for whom English was a second language, I was not at all sure I could communicate with a similarly equipped Italian. I didn’t know enough Italian to fall back on if my English was not clear enough. Turns out, though, that Mauro had lived in Sydney, Australia until he was 16, so his English was nearly perfect.
Mauro made good time—much better than the guides we’d read suggested we would—and we arrived in Tivoli around 10:15. Tivoli seems to be a very nice town. It was definitely more well cared for than the part of Naples we’d seen the day before, but it was still obvious that the old structures needed a lot of care.
I should probably clarify for those of you whom we haven’t already told that today was marketed by the cruise line as a day in Rome, but early on, Mark and I decided that Rome was just too much to see in six or eight hours and that we’d only be haunted by what we’d missed. Instead, we decided to go to Tivoli to see the Villa d’Este gardens and Villa Adriana (aka Hadrian’s Villa).
Mauro suggested we see Villa d’Este first because it had an earlier closing time. He got our tickets for us and sent us on our way. He is not a tour guide—he only drives—so he waited in the car. I hope he had the AC on, because we were in the gardens for nearly two hours and could have done more. If you check out the hyperlink above, you’ll learn that the Villa d’Este gardens are filled with fountains and waterfalls and other beautiful water features, all of which are gravity fed. Not a single pump is used to produce the water ballet in these photos.
Villa Adriana was not at all what we expected. Mark and I both thought that we would be touring the inside of a palace. Instead, we found ourselves in a compound so large that “Village” Adriana would have been a more appropriate name. It was a very large property—several acres at least—filled with lots of ruins with barely a roof to cover any of them. That’s important because about 20 minutes into our visit, a thunderstorm rolled it, and we had to huddle against a wall to keep from getting soaked. We did have our umbrellas (oddly fortunate!), but it was pouring for at least 20 minutes. It was much darker and greyer than it looks in these pictures.
We didn’t see all of Villa Adriana partly because it was soaked with large puddles forbidding entry into just about every ruin and partly because we wanted to be back on the ship well before we were due. What we saw, though—at both Villa d’Este and at Villa Adriana—were beautiful and interesting enough that when we finally do spend a week in Rome, we’ll make a day trip to Tivoli to take a more leisurely stroll through each.
Our drive back from Tivoli to Civitivecchia (about 60 to 90 minutes) was pretty uneventful, and we boarded the ship dog tired but extremely happy with our decision to skip Rome. If you can’t tell, I’m hurrying through now because it’s late, we have another early morning, and I’ve been writing up yesterday and today’s adventures for quite a while. We got cleaned up and had an early-ish dinner at the ship’s steak house where the maitre’d gave us a wonderful window seat with a view of the harbor (and the eight—EIGHT—other cruise ships in dock). After dinner (and ice cream, which we’ve eaten at least one time every day since boarding), we wandered though the entertainment, including a couple live game shows and an Elton John tribute. It’s now about 11:30 p.m. local time, so I’m going to copy and paste this entry into WordPress, activate the links, insert the photos, and call it a night. See you tomorrow.