Herculaneum

Today we visited Herculaneum. We had hoped to have had time to visit Capri, but due to transportation issues, this wasn’t possible.

We got ready earlier to catch the train to Ercolano (Herculaneum) and arrived at the station according to the timetable. What we didn’t realise was that the train which usually left every hour, would not be leaving at this hour, however we didn’t know this at the time, so ended up sitting on the train at the station in Sorrento for over an hour waiting for it to leave (obviously the timetable was wrong but no-one had been bothered to update it). Consequently, by the time we got to Herculaneum, it was too late in the day to have time to visit Capri afterwards.

When we finally arrived at Herculaneum, it was a much smaller site than Pompei and was surrounded on 3 sides by the modern town. I found it really interesting to see the difference in the preservation of the buildings between Pompei and Herculaneum eg. In Herculaneum there are a lot of buildings with 2nd storeys, which you don’t see in Pompei and this is due to the way the two villages were buried during the eruption. Pompei was buried by ash and rocks falling from the sky, thus causing the buildings to collapse, whereas Herculaneum was buried by pyroclastic mud flows, which meant a lot of 2nd storeys survived along with some original wooden beams and rafters which were preserved.

After a couple of hours wandering around Herculaneum, we decided to call it a day and head back to Sorrento as we still had some souvenir shopping to do and we wanted an early night before our long day of travelling tomorrow. We had dinner at the same restaurant we’d been to early that week and had strawberry tiramisu for desert which was “buonissimo”

We’re off to Vencie tomorrow, another long day of travelling on the train (fortunately I’ve downloaded more episodes of Arrow for the journey)

Ciao