Friday 10th May

Set off for the station at about 7.30 & went to buy a
ticket to Naples. Only 1st class was available at E140 so we took it, much to Dick's disgust. The train trip was Ok but it was delayed in a tunnel for 25 mins before Taormina which was frustrating. We did get our best views of Mt Etna from the train as it was a beautiful day. The
countryside of eastern Sicily is so fertile that everywhere vegetables or fruit are grown. As the track ran above the beaches the route was very scenic punctuated with tunnels through any
headlands. The highlight was crossing the Straits of Messina in the train ferry when we had 30minutes off the train wandering the decks.

The mainland was similar to Sicily in that there were miles of beaches & beach resorts but surprisingly most of the towns & villages looked more run down. The extent of intensive horticulture surprised us as there were miles of plastic greenhouses on either side of the line. We arrived in Naples at 5pm & found our way to the hotel which is quite close to the station, is clean & neat but only takes cash, no cards. We decided to stay until Tuesday when we are
off to Rome went looking for an ATM to get cash. Dick’s card got rejected 3 times before it
said out of funds so he used the Aus one, much to his disgust.

Saturday 11th May
Up later today & off for a walk after breakfast to lookup train times to Rome. From there
we wandered along various streets & alleys & found several churches & then the cathedral which was large & quite interesting although not as much as its museum in another church.
This was full of paintings grouped by topic rather than period & gave some very clever interpretations of the development of the orders in the Catholic Church & the saints & martyrs & their origins. The various items were well labelled in Italian & English & it was great to be able to inspect them at such close quarters.
After a coffee waiting out a shower we found the Archaeological Museum which is on a truly grad scale comparable with the V & A in London. It houses several former private collections of Roman statues for the 1st & 2nd centuries AD, mainly copies of Greek works from the 4th to 2nd
centuries BC & masses of frescoes, mosaics, artefacts & statues uncovered at Pompei. The numbers of them are unbelievable & apparently many of the frescoes were only done a few
years before the eruption of Vesuvius which engulfed it in 79 AD as there had been a disastrous earthquake not long before.
Jane went on & found a completely different part of the museum from Dick. Luckily for us entry is free for EU citizens over 65 so it was well worth the entry price to both of us.
Before dinner we bought train tickets to Rome for Tuesday
morning & then had dinner.
All in all a much better day full of surprises.

Sunday 12th May
Rose reasonably early had breakfast & set off to catch a train for Huculaneum. This proved
painless & we arrived on a very rapid but rickety train there at 9.45. A 10 minute walk led us to the ticket office & joy of joys the over 65 EU citizen papers worked the magic. After getting a couple of audio guides with free site maps (unavailable to common enterers) we set off to explore.
Herculaneum was an upmarket seaside town before being engulfed in lava when Vesuvius erupted in 78 AD. The extreme heat killed all the people & effectively baked all the buildings including their contents before the lava flow engulfed it to a depth of 20+ M so it became a time capsule. It was excavated in an amateur way in the late 1700s & more sensitively has been being worked on since the 1920s. Only a fraction has been
excavated but it gives us a good picture of Roman life at the time. We were fascinated & it seemed far better labelled & explained than Pompei its more famous sister town. The exploration took us over 4 hours & we were pretty tired at the end of it all but very satisfied.

After returning to Naples we went to catch a 4k pm tour of subterranean Naples which again was really surprising. The Greeks & the Romans mined the Tufa (lava rock) under the city & used the galleries as an aqueduct & cistern system for water supply. The locals just drilled wells down into the cisterns & hauled up their water in buckets. This went on until the 1880s
when there was an outbreak of cholera. In the 1940s the locals used them as air raid shelters. We saw only 1km of them & that was enough for us as some of the passages were extremely narrow. The guide also showed us a small part of the Roman theatre under a house in the area.
It was an extraordinary experience but was well worth it to us.
Another hard day in the pursuit of knowledge.