Day 12- Herc, you Jerk!

All I need is a bed, somewhere to rest my head!

Well, you win some, and you lose some. After landing in this strange little place last night, I've gotten to kind of like my hosts. Neither one of them looks very Italian- more German or Austrian really, and they are not the loud brash types that seem to be the norm here. They have patience for my rudimentary Italian skills, and they didn't toss me out on the street when the reservation fell through, which would have been a real disaster. I'm also hoping they'll give me bit of a discount for not having wi-fi or a private bath in the flat across the street they gave me. I met one of my flat mates this morning, a nice Polish grad student working on a Phd in chemistry at the University here. She showed me how to work the washing machine, which is another distinct bonus of being over here, as I was just about out of clean socks and underwear. 

This leaves my laundry in the shade!

Went over to the hotel part to have breakfast on the terrace, which was lovely, then collected my things and went down to the Herculaneum Ruins. Several large tour groups had gotten there ahead of me, so I felt like a bit of a salmon as I tried to slip between them while avoiding the mostly overbearing and under-informed guides, who really grate on my nerves. At one point, in the Men's bathhouse, there were two of them going head to head over a very small opening between two of the rooms. Reminded me of the story by Dr. Seuss about the two Zax's, one who always went north and the other who always went south. "Get out of my way, now, and let me go forth!"

Spent some time in the College of the Augustales, a beautifully painted room that also has a lot of carbonized wood that has been preserved where it was found, under a roof that has been reconstructed from the remains. Herculaneum was encased in a pyroclastic flow of hot mud and gases, unlike Pompeii, which was hit with more ash, pumice and gases. The mud in Herculaneum is much harder to remove than the lightweight lapili found at Pompeii and Stabia, but it also preserved more of the organic materials, such as wooden beams, furniture, and even food. There are loaves of carbonized bread in the museum in Boscoreale that show exactly what it looked like, a round loaf with wagon-wheel indentations on top.

Not all of that wood is original, but there are large sections of it that are the real thing, carbonized, but still in place. In the College of the Augustales

This is where things started to go south. As I turned the corner of the top street, which was kind of a piazza like space, I started noticing barriers that had not been there before, and I got a bad feeling, like the previous visit to Pompeii in 2013. Sure enough, when I asked a guard if there was anything open now that hadn't been open two years ago, he sheepishly admitted that no, it was the opposite, that some things that had been open then were in fact closed now, including two that had been high on my list to revisit. The House of the Stags (Casa dei Cervi) was a very opulent house on the seafront (then) and it was also where my camera battery ran out last time. Very sad to hear that was now off limits. Also the Suburban Baths (see yesterday's post for explication of the name), which closed early last time we visited, was now completely out for repair work. The palaestra, where you can go inside some of the original tunnels that were how they explored

 Herculaneum to begin with, is now closed, and none of the ones they were working on last time had been opened since then. Bummer!

I hate this sign!

Nevertheless, there were some nice moments: the House of the Wooden Partition, which has a free standing wooden screen preserved in the atrium, The House of the Grand Portal, which has one of my favorite murals, with theatrical curtains painted over an all blue background, The House of the Beautiful Courtyard (need I say more?) and the House of the Black Salon all stand out. One thing that struck me again was the height of many of the rooms here. The rooms at Pompeii were just as high in many cases, but Pompeii lost more of its height due to the higher heat of the ash and gas mix that blasted down on them, so you're not as aware of that height in most of its sites. The house of the Samnites is another nice one that was still open, thank goodness, and it has a two story atrium that must have been stunning, with molded plaster columns surrounding the upper floor, and traces of what looks to have been a majestic mural all the way around. 

I never get tired of this theatrical frieze mural on the blue walls of the salon of the House of the Grand Portal. 

After finishing up there I found a lunch spot that looked promising but turned out to be rather average and pricey - should have gone further away from the park entrance- I returned to the hotel and found a spot on the terrace to sit and write. While I was sitting there, some kind of "discussion" began to erupt upstairs between about 6 or 7 people, all of whom were eventually shouting over each other at the top of their lungs, overlaid by the bambino, who was yelling "Mamma, Mamma, MAMMA!" the entire time, which must have been 15 minutes. You'd think Vesuvius was erupting and they were arguing about how many would fit in the boat, but it was likely nothing more than a political opinion, which are running high right now due to the elections that just happened. 

"Your Vote Counts!"