This was the day we had chosen to visit Herculaneum. We got there by means of the Circumvesuviana railroad, which left from a separate station close to Napoli Centrale. I suggested walking there, which was okay with everyone, and we set off after breakfast, passing the cleaning woman on the stairs. (I had tried to make coffee in the morning but couldn't get the stove to light, and abandoned the idea of doing anything in the kitchen except using the refrigerator. Later I discovered the gas tap which the cleaning woman must have closed after each time she used the stove.) We walked down Corso Umberto I, then sheered off and went through the market at Piazza Nolana before reaching Corso Garibaldi and walking a little south to the station. It took a bit of work to figure out which of the trains to take, but it was easy enough to buy the one-price tickets; N found the right binario, a train was waiting, and we got on.
It was a short ride to Ercolano, the station for the city which surrounds the excavations at Herculaneum. We spotted our first tourists, a few couples and individuals getting off the train and looking around for the "Scavi" signs. They pointed towards the water; we left the small station and headed down the nondescript street. After a while we couldn't spot anyone who looked like a tourist, and began to doubt we were on the right track. But I knew that the ancient town was on the seafront, and we were not there yet. There appeared to be a park in front of us, and sure enough, this proved to be the northeast edge of the excavations.
We entered the site at about ten o'clock, and spent about four hours there. I will not detail everything we saw; there are plenty of books describing the site and providing pictures. The book we had by the director of excavations claimed that a "cursory look" would take two hours, but we were helped (so to speak) by having many of the most famous buildings be closed (for instance, the House of the Mosaic Atrium, and most of the buildings along the seaward side of the decumanus maximus or main street). Still, we went carefully through what we could, working in a systematic way up the fifth, fourth, and third cardos (cross-streets; I gather the first two are still under the modern city to the northwest, as is most of the city to the north of the decumanus maximus. Because Herculaneum was covered in volcanic mud, many of the upper stories of houses were preserved, and a number of organic items survived -- wooden doors and platforms, lath-and-brick wall construction, foodstuffs in jars, and even papyri. The kids quickly learned the layout of typical houses, with an atrium in front, a triclinium further back with a nymphaeum (or perhaps a peristyle, in fancier houses), the smaller cubicula, and the kitchen off to one side. The best frescoes had been taken away by the early excavators, though Herculaneum was neglected when Pompeii was discovered, and there were many small bits left to marvel over.
We stopped here and there for sips of water and small snacks for the kids. They were good about staying in the shade, and going into houses with a spirit of discovery. The baths, with complete frigidarium, tepidarium, and caldarium, stalls for clothing, basins for quick cold-water rinsing, and hypocaust heating systems, were a particular treat. We explained to the kids how this was not a working city like Ostia, but a retreat for rich people; it was as if Carmel had been encased in volcanic mud (which, come to think of it, is not a bad idea). Still, many of the houses were small, and it was possible to do some imagining of day-to-day life, particularly when we came upon shops or thermopolia (bars or taverns, with distinctive marble counters with round pots set into them).
The site was only about 300 metres by 200, and we felt we had covered it decently at the end of the four hours. Although there were other tourists around, there didn't seem to be any tour groups, and we never felt crowded out of a place. We walked south and then around on the long ramp leading up to modern street level, passing people coming in. There were a couple of touristy cafes just outside the entrance but we walked a few minutes north, to a major intersection near the train station, and went into the pizzeria/tavola calda there. This was still not free of tourist influence -- a sign on the wall in English pointed out that tables could not be occupied without ordering something -- but it seemed a somewhat better bet. Though the menu was fairly basic, what we had -- pizzas with escarole, mixed grilled vegetables, and escarole -- turned out to be pretty decent, and the food, cold water, and draft beer certainly hit the spot.
We took the train all the way back to Napoli Centrale, to try to buy our tickets. But all the windows were closed, and going through the purchase dialogue at the machines (after waiting our turn in the lineup of foreigners) merely got us to a screen with payment options, all of which were crossed out. We joined another line, at the information desk, only to learn that the ticket-sellers were on strike that day. If we intended to take a train that day, we could buy tickets on board, but since we did not, we could just come back tomorrow.
So we left the station and entered the late-afternoon heat (which had never been far away on the journey back). We walked through the narrow streets just west of Piazza Garibaldi, where Spaccanapoli dissolved into a confusing maze. It was hot, narrow, we had to dodge scooters, and people were still taking up every available inch with bancarelles. At one point I caught up with N. "Imagine this, but five to ten degrees hotter, with about ten times as many people, and cow poop to dodge instead of dog poop. That's India." She winced.
The kids deserved a treat, so we went a bit past Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, to a gelateria called Il Golosone. On the way back, I bought a small bottle of limoncello at a shop. I knew enough to get one that was artisanal and made only of lemons, sugar, and alcohol; a 50 cl bottle was about all I could hope to make a dent in, though the proprietor tried to talk me into a larger bottle, and also kept offering tastes in the hopes that I would drink enough to buy more. I put the bottle in the freezer when we got up to the apartment (thankfully, the cleaner and her daughter had gone, though our belongings had been moved to put the owner's clothes away, and the daughter had scribbled on some papers I had left on a table in the sitting room) and it became my late-night and in some cases late-afternoon solace.
We rested, the kids practiced (there was a copy of Dante's Paradiso ostentatiously placed on a book stand on top of the piano, and I took the book off and used the stand for A's music), and in the evening we went to dinner at Masaniello. This was a restaurant listed in Frommer's (we had brought some photocopies from the library) as being hard to find, and a place where there was no written menu, but meals were determined after "elaborate consultations" with the server based on tastes and what was seasonal. In fact, the restaurant was just around the corner from our apartment, on another alley. They had a few prices up to show that the place was not unreasonable, and I had noticed it on one of my futile morning expeditions; someone was in front, and I asked them when they opened in the evening and received the answer of eight o'clock.
But when we went there a little after eight and rang the bell, they told us to come back in fifteen minutes. We walked around through the backstreets for a while, returning at eight-thirty. The door was open at that point, and another family (Spanish, from the sounds of it) were already seated. The "elaborate consultations" turned out to be a list of three or four primi recited by the man we had seen before. I asked, in my fractured Italian, if a tasting menu was possible, and he said no, not really, there was just him working the front room and one chef. The primi bore a suspicious resemblance to the dishes mentioned in the Frommer's listing (so much for seasonality. We ordered spaghetti with lupini di mare (larger clams) and pecorino, but what came was plain old spaghetti alla vongole, no cheese. The kids had spaghetti with mussels. It was tasty, though swimming in oil (good oil, though). For secondi, we had a choice of meat or fish; when we opted for fish, he listed octopus cooked with tomato in a cassola, grilled squid, fried anchovies, and swordfish. We opted for the first three; all were quite nice (the anchovies came with something resembling a crab cake) though fairly salty, and we used up the bread in short order. It turned out to be a pleasant meal, but fairly unremarkable, and certainly not the culinary experience we were expecting.