January 25, 2017
We took it easy on Wednesday. Joanna had some glitch with her car insurance. A combination of an unresponsive agent and some unanswered questions took a while to sort out.
Using the Skype program on my Mac, she called the customer service number for the insurance company and learned that she was OK.
She had paid the agent and told him to pay her insurance premium on time. The agent merely sent the money (minus his cut) to the company.
Like so many companies they let computers make judgments. The company refunded the money because it had been paid weeks too early.
She couldn’t even pay it on Wednesday because the payment isn’t due until March 1, and it was still to early to be accepted. Things are bizarre when a company refuses to be paid in advance.
So it was 2 o’clock before we got out. We walked in a different direction and finally came to the main street of modern Pompei, where we bought some fruit.
All along the way there were square buildings with old, peeling stucco. It’s almost, but not quite picturesque.
The weather is chilly, with daily highs in the 50s, but the climate supports cactus, palms, and agaves.
We stopped at the church again, a highly detailed interior that includes bas reliefs of angry bishops sticking their heads out from frames over the nave. A brochure says there is a painting behind the altar about the Battle of Lepanto, but we didn’t go up to see it because there seems always to be a novena in progress at the front of the church.
So we repaired to another bar named for a church—this one, the Bar Santuario.
Zeppole, espresso, vino rosso, all very good.
We went back to the hotel, where I took a nap.
We had seen the sign for a restaurant called the Garden of the Hesperides (il Giordano delle Esperidi) very close to the hotel. I found its website and it looked like an interesting upscale place, and it even had Taurasi wine, something Larry had told me was top regional variety made of aglianico grapes.
We strolled over there. The signs at the entrance to the parking lot were on, but then everything else was dark.
There was a notice posted on the gate. I couldn’t make most of it out, but it did say something about January 25.
So we started walking toward the center of town. We found a Greek place, but the music and TV were far too loud and we didn’t see anything on the menu that appealed to us.
We wound up walking all the way back to the church plaza before we found a place to have a meal. That’s a long walk in Europe without an eatery.
The restaurant is a family-owned place called Al Gamberone, which sounds like somebody you could know in New Jersey, but I believe it means something like “The Prawn.”
The Nonna came over and started pointing things out on the menu. I don’t know if she was rushing us or trying to be helpful. In any event, I asked her to give us some time alone with the menu.
We found carbonara. Almost real carbonara, no cream, just eggs. It used bacon instead of guanciale and there was onion, maybe a little too much of it. But it was the closest to Roman carbonara that I have been able to get since we left Rome.
We shared an order of it and a huge plate of broccoli rapa. Then we ordered a second carbonara.
We had it with a two-year-old Sorelli Chianti that was very smooth going down.
There were no taxis in sight, so we hiked back to the hotel and passed out.
Jan. 26
We were out of the hotel before 11 on Thursday. The hotel gave us a lift to the light rail station at the far side of the Pompeii ruins. This is by the main gate, named for the Villa of the Mysteries. It’s the gate where all the buses park.
We took a train to Ercolano Scavi, the Ruins of Herculaneum. It really does look like Cambodia here, guys.
There are piles of trash on the tracks.
There’s graffiti everywhere, so much that we got off at the wrong stop and couldn’t tell because all the signs were obscured by spray paint.
I asked some passengers waiting on the platform in my Spanish Italian, “Esa stazione Ercolano?” With a few tries, we managed to peer over the language barrier far enough to learn that we had to go one more stop.
The ruins are straight downhill from the right station.
The excavated part of Herculaneum is much smaller than Pompeii. Some of of the old town is under the new town and has been explored by tunnels, which are closed to the public. The excavated section leading down to the ancient beach is about three stories high.
It had been buried under perhaps a hundred feet of ash, which preserved not only the stone and brick buildings, but also organic matter, including human skeletons and furniture.
The ash also extended the shoreline by perhaps a quarter mile. So now there’s only swampy ground where there used to be seawater.
Some of the beams in place are charred originals. Some of the amphorae are still in place, but most of the removables have been taken to the Archaeological Museum in Naples.
A major restoration is under way because at one point, maybe 20 years ago, the walls had become so unsafe that about two-thirds of the place was off limits to the public.
Masons were working on a couple of walls while we were there.
Like Pompeii, most of the buildings consist of empty rooms. Some are closed and a few are open. Many of those contain colorful murals and carved reliefs.
In its high days, this was my kind of place, with lots of bars and places to eat. Joanna took a photo of me standing appropriately enough behind the one known as the large bar.
A few doors away is another with a faded image of Priapus on the wall to ward off the Evil Eye.
The excavation at the old beach level uncovered about 300 skeletons huddled in warehouses by the water. People had run there and were hoping to be rescued, but the gases and ash overtook them before help came.
Today, a huge wall of hardened ash stands on what used to be the edge of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
I assume the skeletons in the warehouses now are replicas. The originals would be too valuable for research to leave there.
We climbed to the rail station and trained back to Pompei, where we took a taxi to the hotel. We had walked in the ruins for more than three hours and I was sore from the hips down.
All I wanted to do was crawl into bed. So I did. We got up around 8 and went out for dinner.
Esperidi seemed to be still closed, so we went back to Maccarone, across the road from the hotel.
We shared ravioli filled with salt cod, a grilled pork chop, and grilled zucchini. I had a bottle of Aglianico, which Larry called “the noble red grape of Campania.” Noble indeed.
Back to Pompeii tomorrow.
Love to all.
Harry
Jan. 27
Harry: I once asked my Aunt Boski, wife of my uncle George Antheil, what James Joyce was like and she simply replied that he was always impeccably dressed!
Art
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